Germophobes Rejoice! HealthMap Is Here To Keep You Clean

When a consumer is relocating to a new town/state/country there is a plethora of information available on the web they can use to check out their new neighborhood. If they want to see how “walkable” it is there is WalkScore. If they want to see how expensive their new neighbors homes are there is Zillow. Heck, if they want to see where to find the best curry they can just hop on Yelp.

As real estate professionals, being able to provide this kind of targeted information to consumers is of great value & can ultimately be leveraged as a differentiating factor between yourself and other agents in the same market. As our CEO often says (and I’m paraphrasing here) “there are two ways to make money in real estate – be the cheapest or be different”.

But what about the health of a neighborhood or city? Wouldn’t it be nice to know if your new or prospective neighborhood has an outbreak of H1N1, Influenza, or rabies? Now that is valuable information to consumers.

Enter HealthMap – a great mashup which combines all manner of publicly available health data with Google Maps to “achieve a unified and comprehensive view of the current global state of infectious diseases and their effect on human and animal health”.

Using HealthMap you can track a multitude of different diseases and have them sorted by country/county, severity, as well as by a the range of dates which a warning was in effect.

Another great addition to the site has been the development of an accompanying iPhone app which lets you see nearby health warning (which I’m sure will ratchet up the paranoia level of some), set up alerts to be pushed to your mobile device, as well as provide the ability to submit your own outbreak report.

Now that I think about it, having the ability to easily submit your friend’s home as an infectious disease outbreak site might not be such a good idea, but it is still a generous feature in theory!