A GIS-Enabled Public Health/Health Disparities Surveillance System
Abstract
In recent years, information and computer science technology has been widely employed in public health protection to assist in the strategic planning of many existing and emerging areas, such as public health surveillance and response and emergency preparedness. As an important area of health informatics – broadly defined as the collection, analysis, and reporting of health data for the protection of public health, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in conjunction with spatial and temporal analysis techniques have been widely used to detect aberrant patterns of disease occurrences and distribution across various geographic regions at various points in time. Our proposed project seeks to integrate two health data management applications and data structures to standardize data analysis and output for health surveillance purposes, thus offering the potential for improving current/existing data collection/reporting practice by the improvement from current mostly paper-based data collection and reporting, and Improvement for time-lag for federal data collection. The article discusses the needs, opportunities and challenges of such a system.