Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources
ZERO IMPACT FROM HEALTH THREATS
About EIOS
Epidemic Intelligence from Open Sources (EIOS) is the world’s leading initiative for open-source intelligence for public health decision-making. It is led by the WHO as part of its constitutional mandate as the directing and coordinating authority on international health work. EIOS is built on three pillars: a growing global community of practice, a range of multi-disciplinary collaborators and an evolving fit-for-purpose system. The system builds on a long-standing collaboration between WHO and the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission (EC).
Used daily by governments and organizations around the world, the EIOS system uses cutting-edge technology to harness the power of open-source data for the detection and assessment of public health threats, in near real time.
This information provides decision-makers with a crucial time advantage and evidence they can use for quick and effective action.
The global community, including Member States, international and regional organisations, expert networks, research institutes and other collaborators, is at the heart of the initiative. By mid 2024, more than 90 countries and 25 organizations and networks were leveraging the EIOS system.
The WHO Pandemic Hub
Since January 2022, the lead of the EIOS initiative is hosted within the new WHO Hub for Pandemic and Epidemic Intelligence. As one of the Hub’s flagship initiatives, EIOS supports its overall mission to facilitate the global collaboration of partners from multiple sectors, supporting countries and other stakeholders to address future pandemic and epidemic risks with better access to data, better analytical capacities, and better tools and insights for decision-making. With support from the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany, the WHO Pandemic Hub was established in September 2021 in Berlin, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which demonstrated weaknesses around the world in how countries detect, monitor and manage public health threats.
Developing solutions
The Pandemic Hub News Map is one example
of an application that has been developed with colleagues at the JRC to
visualise information coming through the EIOS system. The News Map displays the
headlines and snippets of the ten most recent articles the system has
identified as being related to a number of selected
as well as trending health topics in their original languages.
The Initiative
In an increasingly connected world, threats to public health have the potential to quickly spread from local to national, regional and international levels, affecting global health security faster than ever before. The EIOS initiative aims to mitigate and, ideally, prevent public health emergencies by connecting experts around the world and providing them with the best possible solutions to detect, contextualise, analyse, assess and share information for quick, evidence-based action. As such, the EIOS initiative is by and for experts across national and international organisations, networks and government entities engaged in emergency preparedness and response.
By consolidating a wide range of efforts and platforms, the EIOS initiative is building on a growing global community of practice, a range of multi-disciplinary collaborators and an evolving fit-for-purpose system, jointly working towards the EIOS vision of a world where health threats are identified and responded to so early and rapidly that they have zero impact on lives and livelihoods.
EIOS Global Technical Meeting
The annual EIOS Global Technical Meeting, or “GTM” in short, is organized by the EIOS Core Team and the key event for the EIOS community. In the spirit of the initiative, understanding itself as a global collaborative of multi-disciplinary experts, the meeting aims to bring these experts together once a year to further strengthen existing networks, build new alliances as well as to discuss topical challenges, solutions and innovations in the field of Public Health Intelligence (PHI).
Newsletters
All →
1 June 2024
EIOS Newsletter May 2024
The May 2024 edition presents updates on EIOS implementation across all six WHO Regions, and dives into the concept of Collaborative Surveillance. It also...
1 January 2024
EIOS Newsletter January 2024
In keeping with our cherished tradition, the start of the year invites a moment of reflection on our journey, revisiting milestones, and celebrating collective...
1 October 2023
EIOS Newsletter October 2023
The final edition of 2023, the October Newsletter, highlights the new PHI Training Working Group and recaps the most recent EIOS Training of Trainers workshop...
1 July 2023
EIOS Newsletter July 2023
The July edition provides updates on EIOS implementation from WHO Regional Offices and two of our collaborators (US CDC and WOAH) that took place in the...
Publications
All →Publications included in this section showcase articles describing practical use cases of the EIOS initiative or in which the EIOS system is analysed, evaluated, or compared to other public health intelligence systems. The EIOS Core Team makes no claims or guarantees about the completeness, accuracy, content or quality of information contained.
In 2021, the National Institute of Infectious Diseases, Japan, undertook enhanced event-based surveillance (EBS) for infectious diseases occurring overseas...
Health Workforce (HWF)
Essential public health functions: the key to resilient health systems
It has become increasingly important that we develop greater global consensus on the definition and scope of public health services if system strengthening...
31 July 2023
Global public health intelligence report 2022
Early detection and rapid response to health threats and emergencies is one of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) most important priorities....
