GIS and Public Health - Issues With GIS For Public Health

Issues With GIS For Public Health

There are also concerns or issues with use of GIS tools for public health efforts. Chief among those is a concern for privacy and confidentiality of individuals. Public health is concerned about the health of the population as a whole, but must use data on the health of individuals to make many of those assessments, and protecting the privacy and confidentiality of those individuals is of paramount importance. Use of GIS displays and related databases raises the potential of compromising those privacy standards, so some precautions are necessary to avoid pinpointing individuals based on spatial data. For example, data may need to be aggregated to cover larger areas such as a zip code or county, helping to mask individual identities. Maps can also be constructed at smaller scales so that less detail is revealed. Alternately, key identifying features (such as the road and street network) can be left off the maps to mask exact location, or it may even be advisable to intentionally offset the location markers by some random amount if deemed necessary.

It is well established in the literature that statistical inference based on aggregated data can lead researchers to erroneous conclusions, suggesting relationships that in fact do not exist or obscuring relationships that do in fact exist. This issue is known as the Modifiable Areal Unit Problem. For example, New York public health officials worried that cancer clusters and causes would be misidentified after they were forced to post maps showing cancer cases by ZIP code on the internet. Their assertion was that ZIP codes were designed for a purpose unrelated to public health issues, and so use of these arbitrary boundaries might lead to inappropriate groupings and then to incorrect conclusions.