The Prevalence Project is a collaboration between Epidemiologists, Computer Scientists, and Healthcare researchers to improve the reporting and dissemination of prevalence information.
What is prevalence?
- Prevalence is the proportion of a population that has a specific condition.
- Prevalence is calculated by: prevalence = (number with the condition/ population number) x 100
There are over 90,000 PubMed references with the word “prevalence” in the title and over 400,000 where “prevalence” is found in either the title or the abstract. This information is important to the public, government institutions, non-government agencies and academic researchers.
The time and effort to manually calculate and report on prevalence is significant. Automated approaches would improve prevalence reporting so that every medical condition, in every geographic area with available data, would be reported upon in a timely, standardized, comprehensive manner.
The Prevalence Project has the following research goals:
- Automatically extracting prevalence information from the published literature.
- Automatically deriving prevalence information from existing data sets.
- Collating a comprehensive repository of prevalence information and statistics.
- Disseminating prevalence information to the public and research communities.
Reasons for the Prevalence Project:
- Improve the timeliness and scope of prevalence reporting
- Reduce the energy and costs of manually reporting on prevalence
- Provide a comprehensive repository for the world’s prevalence information
Future of the Prevalence Project:
- To demonstrate the usefulness of automated methods in public health research
- To develop population simulation models using the latest prevalence information
- To push past prevalence into other epidemiology methods that should be automated