Geographic information system (GIS) as a tool for disease surveillance and environmental health research

While we have seen the wide use of other information technologies in health services and management, the use of geographic information technologies in health related services has been limited so far. Given that location-related data play important roles in many health related services, it is anticipated that geographic information technologies have a lot to offer in helping improve health related services, management, and research. As an example, the authors report the development of a geographic information system (GIS) for Texas-Mexico border disease surveillance and environmental health research. This presentation covers three important aspects in the development of the GIS: (1) the specification of uses and users of the GIS and the associated data, products, and functions; (2) a preliminary design of the data types and formats in the GIS; and (3) a prototype of a GIS-based spatial search tool that can be used to support environmental epidemiology research. In some disease monitoring and environmental epidemiology studies, it is often necessary to perform spatial search to determine the distances between environmental hazardous sites and the locations of cases and controls when distance is used as measure of exposure. The GIS can be used to interactively and automatically determine the distance between any possible pair of environmental hazardous sites and cases/controls. Preliminary results suggest that the prototype GIS is indeed a powerful tool for spatial search when distance is used as a measure of exposure in environmental health research. The reported system should be useful to researchers facing similar situations in disease monitoring and environmental health research.