Boston Children's Hospital uses HealthMap, an AI-powered disease surveillance system it founded in 2006, which scrapes the internet hourly across 17 languages to detect emerging infectious disease outbreaks in real time. In April 2025, the hospital co-launched BEACON, a new open-source platform that feeds HealthMap signals into a large language model to prioritize and contextualize global biothreat alerts.

HealthMap is a real-time disease tracking and mapping system developed at Boston Children's Hospital that monitors online sources for signals about infectious disease outbreaks, using natural language processing to extract structured information from unstructured sources. In April 2025, Boston Children's partnered with Boston University to launch BEACON (Biothreats Emergence, Analysis, and Communications Network), which funnels HealthMap's web-scraped signals into a large language model trained to translate, prioritize, and contextualize infectious disease information and compile reports. BEACON is open-source and built with $3 million in grants from government agencies and private foundations.