Booz Allen Hamilton - September 01, 2015
In 1995, Richard Preston released The Hot Zone, a non-fiction thriller detailing the origins and episodes of the lethal, highly contagious Ebola virus. For perspective, Stephen King described just the first chapter as "one of the most horrifying things I've read in my whole life." What neither Preston nor King knew, however, was just how disturbingly relevant this book would prove to be.
Nineteen years after The Hot Zone's release, the virus broke out again. In March 2014, reports emerged of an Ebola outbreak in West Africa-one that rapidly grew into the deadliest incidence of the virus since its discovery in 1976. Within mere months, more than 25,000 documented cases of Ebola plagued Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia. At least 10,000 died.
And then, in the heat of the crisis, Ebola went global. The virus immigrated to America, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, the Netherlands, Spain, and Switzerland. Nine more countries were infected, with 24 additional confirmed cases. Only nineteen of those individuals are still alive.
With rigorous decontamination processes and the ability to track infected persons in place, America and the eight European countries contained their outbreaks. Quarantining Ebola in West Africa, however, was significantly more difficult for two basic reasons. First, these countries lacked real-timeawareness of regional outbreaks, delaying response time and resource deployment to the appropriate regions. Second, they lacked the necessary technology to track, transmit, and syndicate health data among the aid workers screening locals and administering vaccine trials on the ground.
Even so, the ability to accurately-—and digitally-recognize and confirm the identities of local West Africans is just one half of the problem; the ability to track them, monitor their sentiments, and predict the next flare-up of the epidemic is another.
"Epidemico (Booz Allen's recently-acquired healthy analytics subsidiary) first identified the Ebola outbreak in 2014," Lead Associate and immunologist Diane Epperson remarks. Epidemico uses digital disease detection technology that provides real-time analytics and insights into population health. It's the difference between knowing who's sick, and knowing who's going to get sick.
Epidemico's MedWatcher product scrapes news feeds and administers a data processing algorithm to tag, filter, analyze, and visualize any health or threat alert, anywhere on the globe.
Right now, we can track sentiment about Ebola-like how West African communities feel about clinical vaccine trials, or when eyewitness reporters break news-and parse social media for emerging public health threats. All data is aggregated, analyzed, and then visualized on maps to project where an outbreak may move.
With a device in place for aid workers to capture biometric information and a cloud environment built to syndicate their data, the working group integrated MedWatcher's data visualization and analytics technology to meet the needs of aid organizations. Our INTREPID package-the augmented hardware device modified with facial recognition, the INTREPID cloud environment, and the data visualization and analytics—is a solution for Ebola contact and vaccine tracing and beyond.
"Once you build it for Ebola, you can switch it for any other disease," Diane explains. A customizable product, INTREPID helps aid workers identify people who might be at risk for contamination, and visualizes data for those workers in ways are that are hands-on, instantaneous, and secure. Organizations would be able to deployresources to contain outbreaks of diseases before they spread out of control. Whether it's Ebola, anthrax, SARS, or MERS, we've built something that will be necessary in the future—it's just a matter of when.
Although it took nearly one year before the disease was contained to a geographically limited area, fortunately, the death tolls in West Africa have fallen dramatically. Dr. Margaret Chen, new head of the WHO, predicts the Ebola outbreak will end by this fall.
According to Adam, "In addition to helping organizations with critical agendas in the health market, INTREPID injects a highly customiz-able, out-of-the-box product into the biosurveillance market." One that can identify people, store, and analyze data in the cloud through a small, rugged, handheld device.
INTREPID is a proof of concept of Booz Allen's ability to spot a problem early, leverage our growing product portfolio, and discern the people, skills, and technology required to engineer a potent remedy to prepare the world for the next hot zone.
