background - location

Location information is becoming more and more available through all sorts of tools and technologies. GPS units have become commonplace in many parts of the world; web-based applications such as Google Earth allow us to zoom in to street level photographic detail in many parts of the world, and GIS desktop applications are no longer tools of experts and specialist institutions. Public Health has much ground to cover in this area, but it is ground well worth covering as location information - or spatial intelligence - adds a critical component to its practice, and informs one of descriptive epidemiology's three fundamental pillars - "place".

GIS, as far as this web site is concerned, does not stand for "Guaranteed Income Supplement"! Rather, it stands for "Geographic Information Systems", though some have changed the "S" to stand for "Sciences" instead of "Systems". GIS are much more than just digital maps. They are a collection of hardware, software, data and personnel, all coming together to visualise and analyse data with a spatial and temporal perspective. GIS is not a "be-all and end-all" solution to public health, but rather, an invaluable tool in the epidemiologist's tool box. After all, there is no better way to visualise and analyse the "place" component of the epi triad than to actually map it geographically!

The problem, of course, is detail....or more properly, scale. In other words, what geographic scale is the health information being collected and used at? Is it the state or provincial level? Postal or zip code? Nieghbourhood? Street address? Latitude and Longitude? You can see that the more detail - and therefore the larger the scale (think of it as a fraction) - the more likely it is to compromise privacy by identifying an individual. Therefore, while GIS are a critical component for improving public health research and practice, caution must also be used so as not to violate individual privacy.

Geomatics is now commonly used to reflect the overarching discipline often applied alongside public health to enhance visualisation, analysis, and ultimately evidence-based decision making.

You can read more about GIS on Wikipedia at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geographic_information_system

Publications

(Methods of Information in Medicine, 2011)

A Method for Managing Re-Identification Risk from Small Geographic Areas in Canada
(BMC Med Inform Decis Mak, 2010)

Musings on Privacy Issues in Health Research Involving Disaggregate Geographic Data About Individuals (Int J Health Geogr, 2009)

Evaluating Predictors of Geographic Area Population Size Cut-offs (JAMIA, 2009)

The Perceived Impact of Location Privacy
(BMC Public Health, 2008)