Start with Atlas Lyme

Atlas Lyme is an Epidemiologist Decision Intelligence Platform for Lyme disease and other tick-borne diseases. It brings fragmented human disease, tick/vector, pathogen, climate, habitat, population, and scientific evidence together so epidemiologists can understand what is happening, investigate why, and decide what deserves closer review.

Our product vision is from fragmented surveillance data to timely, interpretable, evidence-backed public-health action. Atlas is being built to identify what matters, explain why it matters, communicate uncertainty, and help epidemiologists decide what deserves investigation.

The platform supports a practical path from data to signals, context, interpretation, investigation, and—when the evidence supports it—public-health action.

Start with the orientation guides:

• What is Atlas Lyme? — the product category, purpose, and boundaries.
• Who is Atlas for? — the people and questions the platform is designed to support.
• The Atlas decision-support workflow — how Atlas moves from One Health evidence to an investigation question.
• Professional workspace — the signed-in Atlas Explorer, Compare, Ask Atlas, Feed, Settings, and Docs destinations.
• Current capabilities — what is available now, planned, experimental, or not supported.
• Investigation workflows — practical question-to-next-step guides for reviewing a signal.
• Evidence, provenance, and uncertainty — how to interpret outputs and distinguish missing evidence from low observed signal.
• Sources and canonical evidence — how governed sources are designed to become one evidence model, and what is released today.
• AI-enabled decision intelligence — what AI means in Atlas and the status of current, planned, and experimental capabilities.
• API, MCP, and access — the public REST contract, and the current status of MCP and API keys.
• API reference — the public OpenAPI contract rendered from the pinned spec, including version and source.
• FAQ and troubleshooting — answers for interpretation, loading, filters, data availability, and HelpDocs navigation.
• Developer overview — anonymous REST reads, from one county request through citation.

Who Atlas is for

Atlas is designed for epidemiologists, public-health surveillance teams, researchers, and other partners who need to review geographic signals without losing sight of the evidence quality behind them.

Use Atlas when you need to ask:

• What is happening, and where?
• What evidence supports that interpretation?
• How current, complete, and comparable is the evidence?
• Which areas or signals may warrant investigation next?

What Atlas is — and is not

Atlas is a decision-support platform, not an autonomous decision-maker. It helps users organize and interpret public evidence; it does not replace epidemiologists, public-health analysts, or domain experts.

Atlas helps users explore patterns in public evidence at the county level. A review-priority score or other analytical signal is a structured way to focus questions; it is not a diagnosis, an individual exposure or disease-risk prediction, a measure of disease burden, or proof of causation.

The current release is an early public prototype and situational-awareness foundation. Capability pages distinguish verified public behavior from planned, in-development, and experimental work. Atlas should help identify signals and investigation candidates—not claim that an outbreak will occur or that a geography is definitively safe or unsafe.

A quick start

Signed-in workspace:

1. Sign in and open Atlas Explorer. Choose the United States or one state.
2. Use the map and the county list together, then open county evidence for one county. Suggested follow-up is on that same page.
3. Open Compare for two counties. Read the professional workspace for the six destinations and for what is still empty or experimental.
4. Open Docs from the workspace navigation when you need this reference. It opens in a new tab and leaves the review address in the original tab.

Older public bookmarks such as /overview, /geographic_explorer, and /investigate open Atlas Explorer after sign-in. They are not separate pages.

Read the evidence carefully

Atlas combines measures that can have different geographies, years, publishers, and update schedules. The application displays the release and methodology information available for the current result. Check the source and vintage before comparing measures.

Missing is not zero

An absent published county record can reflect zero reported cases, suppression, an unavailable source, a different reporting boundary, or another limitation. Do not treat a missing value as proof that no disease or surveillance activity exists.

Start with provenance

For a defensible follow-up question, record the source, source vintage, geography, retrieval or load context when available, methodology version, and known limitations. Use the in-application data dictionary and methodology sections for context that must stay close to the result.

Help and trustworthy use

Use Docs in the public Atlas utility bar, or Docs in the professional workspace navigation. Both open this help center in a new tab and leave the analytical page in the original tab. The public Privacy page and AI Ethics page remain the approved in-application sources for those topics; this guide does not create separate policy commitments. Workspace pages do not add a separate contextual-help layer.

Developer and agent access

The public REST API is documented by its owning service. Start with API, MCP, and access, the developer overview, the generated API reference, and the machine-readable OpenAPI schema. Public reads do not use an API key. Production MCP exposes bounded anonymous read-only evidence tools for that same governed evidence. The September 2026 smoke-only development receipt is historical. Settings does not generate API keys in this release.