Health and human service practitioners are using geographic information system (GIS) applications to broaden their view of today’s complex health issues, from maintaining healthy populations, to understanding obesity, to responding to threats to public health. Stephanie Bailey, MD, M.S.H.S.A., chief, Public Health Practice, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), recently challenged colleagues to use GIS technology to incorporate social, economic, and cultural contexts into a network of health-related information. “New settings require new science, and they require finding ways into those settings to find out where the need for public health is the greatest,” said Bailey. “The geographic information system approach is one of those emerging technologies that will move us toward success.”
Bailey made the comments to an audience of more than 300 health leaders, innovators, and health and human services practitioners who recently attended the 2007 ESRI Health GIS Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona. During the conference, more than 60 presenters spoke on a wide range of GIS technology contributions that enable health and human service organization work around the globe.
Raymond Aller, MD, director, Automated Disease Surveillance Section, Division of Communicable Disease Control, Los Angeles County Department of Public Health, concurred with Bailey in his Keynote Address on the power of place in medicine. Aller said, "Developing digital place histories has important potential in helping physicians to fully comprehend the impact of where a person lives, works, and plays and can enable physicians to make more enlightened diagnoses. Getting accurate geographic information into the electronic medical record will take serious dedication by GIS practitioners. The place history must be timely, context sensitive, and immediately understandable by the physician if it is to become an important part of medical diagnosis."
Addressing the privacy challenges and issues of using patient place-history data, Gerard Rushton, Ph.D., geography professor, University of Iowa, identified several technical methods for masking data while retaining the information useful for spatial analysis. Ruston stated, "The collection and use of such wide-ranging information must come with assurances of privacy and confidentiality."
Communication with the public was also identified as an important role for GIS. Stanley Scheyer, MD, former medical director of the Peace Corps, shared a conceptual framework for broader use of existing human health and environmental data at the community level. Donna Garland, chief, CDC Office of Enterprise Communications, encouraged the audience to use Web-enabled GIS to improve public access to important information. "Communication is more important now than ever before, and not because there is too little, but because there is so much," said Garland, adding, "Today we have a more complex responsibility to ensure information sharing that is timely, accurate, and useful." Elizabeth West, CPHIMS, vice president of corporate relations for Health Information Management Systems Society (HIMSS), echoed the importance of communication through her discussion on the standardization of health information exchanges with clinical information systems and the impact of these standards on community, statewide, and nationwide health information networks.
Addressing a current priority issue, Abel Kho, MD, assistant professor of medicine at Northwestern University, described a new approach to using GIS within the hospital setting to help battle increases in hospital-acquired infections. Kho used GIS to track patient-provider contact in hospitals and identify caregiver workflows that might be improved, with the goal of reducing hospital-acquired infection and infection transmission.
Several presenters described other GIS applications to current issues. Jared Shoultz, director, Division of Public Health Informatics, South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control, explained how his state health department incorporates GIS technologies into its everyday workflows across the agency. Fazlay Faruque, Ph.D., PG, and director, GIS and Remote Sensing Department, University of Mississippi Medical Center, demonstrated the use of GIS technology to power a real-time disease surveillance system aimed at improving the understanding of the public health challenges of pediatric asthma. Chris McInnish, deputy commissioner, Alabama Department of Children’s Affairs; Dave Gruber, senior assistant commissioner, Division of Health Infrastructure Preparedness and Emergency Response, New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services; and Shiloh Turner, M.P.A., director, Health Data Improvement, Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati, demonstrated specific uses of GIS technologies that directly serve health challenges within communities.
In conclusion, Bill Davenhall, global health manager, ESRI, said, "The wide range of innovative solutions presented during this conference attest to the positive contributions that GIS technology is making toward smarter, safer, and more efficient health and human services delivery."
For more information about GIS in health and the 2007 ESRI Health GIS Conference, visit www.esri.com/healthgis.