Infonaut is in the bird flu business. The Toronto startup (incubated at MaRS) provides governments with a Health Informatics GIS solution for pandemic preparedness and emergency response planning. Plain English: Healthcare Map Mashup, on which one can layer predictive indicators such as emergency response times, demographic data, hospital service areas, and even poultry density reports (don?t ask).
The Canadian Government knows all too well about dealing with pandemics (remember SARS), but don?t write off Infonaut as just making a quick sale using scare tactics. The web service is employed by a diverse set of clients; health insurance companies are using it to target populations interested in supplemental insurance plans.
I saw a demo of the product and it looks like a full featured web app. While other epidemiology GIS tools are available, few if any have preloaded data sets, map relative rss news feeds, markup tools, multi format import / export, streamlined document sharing, and most impressive – automated information propagation to healthcare providers.
Prevention is the best medicine and Infonaut is on the path to success.
Leave a Reply