Azure Maps Covid-19 Open Source Project for Healthcare Agencies

John Snow’s Cholera map is generally regarded as the first attempt to use geospatial analytics to better understand patterns in the spread of a pandemic. His maps uncovered the cause of the Broad Street cholera outbreak of 1854 (and was part of the 1846–1860 cholera pandemic happening worldwide) in the Soho district of the City of Westminster, London. With the prevalence of data and mapping tools, its something that data journalists and healthcare organizations do on a regular basis to understand hidden patterns and causes of viral outbreaks.

Today, COVID-19 is on our minds as the situation evolves across the globe. Many of us at Microsoft, are using our technology & innovative ideas to help address the many issues around dealing with the pandemic. The Azure Maps team is passionate about enabling our customers with geospatial insights: the ability to unlock interesting insights and patterns from combinations of publicly available data. In an attempt to empower healthcare agencies from around the world to easily use our geospatial capabilities, we decided to pull together a dashboard that analyzed the progression of the Covid-19 virus over time.

Our goal is to enable, healthcare agencies & others to reuse the code that we built out, but use data sources of their choice, add local data, like for instance, nearby hospitals, capacity information, contacts and more. The dashboard can be customized for specific geographies and enhanced with proprietary and local information. The dashboard is designed for use for internal as well as external communication and reporting.

We chose to make the source code available to healthcare agencies and others, specifically so that they can customize it for the information and KPIs that they want to track, analyze and communicate. We feel that healthcare professionals best understand the nuances in epidemiology and the calculations needed for getting the right insights. As a result, we made our platform & code available for them to quickly be up and running. We built out the dashboard by connecting to the data repository for the 2019 Novel Coronavirus Visual Dashboard operated by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering (JHU CSSE).  The dashboard was setup to analyze the spatio temporal data available and animate the time series as the virus spread across the globe over time.

We hope the source code is useful for healthcare agencies around the world who can focus on analyzing the data, understanding the patterns and making valuable decisions with it.

 

You can download the source code from the GitHub repo: http://bit.ly/2QbfWk4

 

For more information about Azure Maps:

• Overview: https://azure.com/maps
• Documentation: https://aka.ms/AzureMapsDocs
• Getting Started: https://aka.ms/AzureMapsGettingStarted
• Code Samples: https://aka.ms/AzureMapsSamples
• Videos: https://aka.ms/AzureMapsVideos
• Blog: https://aka.ms/AzureMapsBlog
• Developer Forums: https://aka.ms/AzureMapsForums
• Azure Maps IoT School: https://aka.ms/AzureMapsIoTSchool 
• Case Studies: https://aka.ms/AzureMapsCaseStudies