Patent ID: 8392152

Claim:
A method for automated identification of disease outbreak, the method comprising: obtaining patient records for a plurality of patients, said records including structured and unstructured data; for each patient of the plurality of patients, mining data from the unstructured data of the patient record using domain-specific knowledge contained in a knowledge base to produce one or more probabilistic assertions; for each patient of the plurality of patients, correlating the structured data and the probabilistic assertions with disease indicia from at least one disease to determine a correlation value between the patient and each of the at least one disease; outputting an alert when at least one correlation value exceeds a first predetermined threshold; calculating a joint probability that at least one patient of the plurality of patients has the at least one disease based on each of the correlation values and a measure of geographic proximity between each of the plurality of patients; and outputting an alert when the calculated joint probability exceeds a second predetermined threshold.