GIS and Public Health - GIS For Public Health

GIS For Public Health

Today’s public health problems are much larger in scope than those Dr. Snow faced, and researchers today depend on modern GIS and other computer mapping applications to assist in their analyses. For example, see the map to the right depicting death rates from heart disease among white males above age 35 in the US between 2000 and 2004.

Public health informatics (PHI) is an emerging specialty which focuses on the application of information science and technology to public health practice and research. As part of that effort, a GIS – or more generally a Spatial Decision Support System (SDSS) – offers improved geographic visualization techniques, leading to faster, better, and more robust understanding and decision-making capabilities in the public health arena.

For example, GIS displays have been used to show a clear relationship between clusters of emergent Hepatitis C cases and those of known intravenous drug users in Connecticut. Causality is difficult to prove conclusively – collocation does not establish causation – but confirmation of previously established causal relationships (like intravenous drug use and Hepatitis C) can strengthen acceptance of those relationships, as well as help to demonstrate the utility and reliability of GIS-related solution techniques. Conversely, showing the coincidence of potential causal factors with the ultimate effect can help suggest a potential causal relationship, thereby driving further investigation and analysis (source needed?).

Alternately, GIS techniques have been used to show a lack of correlation between causes and effects or between different effects. For example, the distributions of both birth defects and infant mortality in Iowa were studied, and the researchers found no relationship in those data. This led to the conclusion that birth defects and infant mortality are likely unrelated, and are likely due to different causes and risk factors.

GIS can support public health in different ways as well. First and foremost, GIS displays can help inform proper understanding and drive better decisions. For example, elimination of health disparities is one of two primary goals of Healthy People 2010, one of the preeminent public health programs in existence today in the US. GIS can play a significant role in that effort, helping public health practitioners identify areas of disparities or inequities, and ideally helping them identify and develop solutions to address those shortcomings. GIS can also help researchers integrate disparate data from a wide variety of sources, and can even be used to enforce quality control measures on those data. Much public health data is still manually generated, and is therefore subject to human-generated mistakes and miscoding. For example, geographic analysis of health care data from North Carolina showed that just over 40% of the records contained errors of some sort in the geographic information (city, county, or zip code), errors that would have gone undetected without the visual displays provided by GIS. Correction of these errors led not only to more correct GIS displays, but also improved ALL analyses using those data.