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Reviewed and published by trentmaziarz, June 30, 2026. Discovered and drafted by our automated research pipeline.

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.

Details

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.

Products affected

HealthMapBEACON (Biothreats Emergence, Analysis, and Communications Network)

Sources & Evidence

News Article

BEACON Launches Today, Delivering AI-powered Global Disease Surveillance

Boston University Hariri Institute·Apr 2025

https://www.bu.edu/hic/2025/04/24/beacon-delivers-ai-powered-global-disease-surveillance/

News Article

BU Launches an Open-Source Infectious Diseases Monitoring Tool Powered by AI and Human Experts

Boston University·Apr 2025

https://www.bu.edu/articles/2025/open-source-ai-infectious-diseases-monitoring-tool/

Company Disclosure

About HealthMap

HealthMap / Boston Children's Hospital·Jan 2024

https://healthmap.org/about/

Cite this record

Trace Foundation. (2026). Boston Children's Hospital: 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 (data as of 2026-06-30) [Data set record]. AI Trace. https://www.aitrace.org/r/practice/43c6bd74-c5bf-4cf1-a518-45881733a086. Accessed October 5, 2026.

Stable link: https://www.aitrace.org/r/practice/43c6bd74-c5bf-4cf1-a518-45881733a086
Data as of: June 30, 2026
Last verified: Not recorded

How to cite AI Trace

Other practices by Boston Children's Hospital

OtherBoston Children's Hospital integrated OpenAI's ChatGPT for Healthcare, an enterprise-grade, HIPAA-compliant AI workspace, rolling it out to clinical, research, and administrative staff as one of the platform's earliest adopters at launch in January 2026. The platform is powered by GPT-5 models evaluated through physician-led testing.Data AnalysisBoston Children's Hospital deployed VirtualHip, a fully automated AI tool integrated across its Adolescent and Young Adult Hip Preservation Program clinic, which converts routine 2D medical images into detailed 3D hip models and provides clinicians with diagnostic and treatment guidance within about one hour. It is described as the first fully automated AI tool of its kind deployed across a US hip clinic.ProductivityBoston Children's Hospital deployed an AI system that analyzes clinical notes and estimates how sick each patient is to improve how operating room time is allocated. This allows surgical schedules to be planned further in advance, increasing the number of patients who can receive timely care.

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