Health Info: “Google Flu Trends Website Shuts Down; Will Send Data to Boston Children’s, Columbia, CDC”

From Mobi Health News:

Google Flu Trends, as a website open to the general public, has shut down. The Google Flu Trends team will continue to track flu patterns based on search history, but it will now provide that data directly to public health researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Boston Children’s Hospital, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Influenza Division. Google Dengue Trends is also no longer publishing new data.
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…Boston Children’s already has a website that incorporates Google Flu Trends data, called the HealthMap FluCast. It also brings in CDC data, data from athenahealth’s EHR, and publicly reported data from Boston Children’s FluNearYou site. Columbia has an Infectious Diseases Prediction dashboard where they’re experimenting with different data sources to track the spread of disease. These tools will continue to serve as places where the public can see Flu Trends data, and the researchers will have access to better data than they had before, to build better models, [John] Brownstein, [the new CIO of Boston Children’s Hospital] said.

Read the Complete Mobi Health News Article
Includes info about how to get access to archival Google Flu Trends data for non-commercial purposes.

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