ISDS Annual Conference Proceedings 2017. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-
Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution,  
and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

ISDS 2016 Conference Abstracts

EpiCore: Crowdsourcing Health Professionals to 
Verify Disease Outbreaks
Jennifer M. Olsen*
Skoll Global Threats Fund, San Francisco, CA, USA

Introduction
EpiCore draws on the knowledge of a global community of human, 

animal, and environmental health professionals to verify information 
on disease outbreaks in their geographic regions. By using innovative 
surveillance techniques and crowdsourcing these experts, EpiCore 
enables faster global outbreak detection, verification, and reporting.

Methods
Through a secure online platform, members are able to easily and 

quickly provide local information to expedite outbreak verification. 
EpiCore volunteer applications are vetted to ensure that they possess 
the public health and epidemiologic expertise necessary to contribute 
to the platform.

Results
EpiCore currently has over 1600 members that span 135 countries. 

During the first 8 months of EpiCore’s launch, 172 requests for 
information to volunteers have been posted with an average response 
rate of over 80%.

Conclusions
With its geographical distribution of members and high response 

rate, EpiCore is poised to enable the world to verify potential outbreak 
signals faster. By improving situational awareness, de-escalating 
rumors or false information, and corroborating using other existing 
sources, EpiCore is able to reduce the signal to noise ratio in disease 
surveillance. Hence, by detecting and verifying outbreaks faster, 
health officials can generate early responses that can curb epidemics 
and save lives.

Keywords
Disease Verification; crowdsourcing; online platform

Acknowledgments
EpiCore was initiated as a partnership between the Skoll Global Threats 
Fund, HealthMAP, ProMED, and TEPHINET.

*Jennifer M. Olsen
E-mail: jolsen@skollglobalthreats.org

Online Journal of Public Health Informatics * ISSN 1947-2579 * http://ojphi.org * 9(1):e176, 2017