Healthify: Influenza Population Health Analytics Platform

Project Overview

Healthify is a lightweight analytics platform designed for public health professionals and population-based researchers to explore, model, and forecast seasonal influenza trends. Built using open-source tools and powered by CDC surveillance data, the platform enables data-driven insights into geographic and demographic flu patterns across the United States.

The application integrates biostatistical, geospatial, and machine learning methods to support real-time epidemiological decision-making and facilitate public health research, planning, and intervention design.

Key Capabilities

1. Data Integration and Processing

• Source: CDC FluSurv-NET
• Coverage: ~30 million individuals across 90+ U.S. counties and 14 states
• Pipeline: Data cleaning, transformation, and aggregation using R (with support for stratification by age, race, and region)

2. Epidemiological Modeling

• Incidence and hospitalization trends over time
• Time series forecasting (ARIMA/SARIMA)
• Compartmental models (SIR, SEIR) for epidemic simulations
• Logistic regression and machine learning for risk prediction

3. Geospatial & Social Vulnerability Insights

• County- and state-level visualizations of flu burden
• Overlay of Social Vulnerability Index (SVI) impacts on epidemic curves
• Exploration of health disparities and demographic risk patterns

4. Visualization & Accessibility

• Interactive dashboards: Built with R Shiny (for dynamic exploration)
• Static views: Built with DataWrapper for lightweight public sharing

Target Users

This platform supports analysts, epidemiologists, and program leads across:

• Public health agencies (e.g., CDC, state/local health departments)
• Academic institutions (epidemiology and public health researchers)
• Health systems and NGOs focused on infectious disease mitigation
• Biopharma and policy organizations tracking population health signals

Getting Started

Clone Repository

git clone https://github.com/h-hedman/healthify-flu-app.git
cd healthify-flu-app

Explore the codebase and launch the Shiny app locally, or access the hosted version via: