Geomedicine: Geography and Personal Health
Bill Davenhall, Esri
August 2012
Table of Contents
3 Introduction
3 What Is Geomedicine?
3 What Is GIS?
4 The Missing Link
4 Geography and Personal Health
6 Improving Personal Health and Safety
7 A Road Map to Better Health
10 Answering Questions
10 What Can Your Address Reveal about Your Health?
10 What Can Your Address Reveal about Your Health?
12 Are There Toxins in Your Home?
13 Are There Toxic Chemicals in Your Community?
14 Is Your Local Water Supply Safe?
15 Do You Live in a Food Desert?
18 Geomedicine at Work
18 The Geography of Cancer
19 Mapping Breast and Prostate Cancer Patterns
20 Busy Roads, Air Pollution, and Environmental Health Risks
23 Does the Environment Really Matter to Your Health?
23 GIS and Global Health
25 Evaluating Geomedicine
27 The Future of Geomedicine
29 Bibliography
31 Acknowledgments
31 About the Author
31 About Esri
Introduction
Linking one’s own personal health status to specific geographic factors provides a powerful set of information that medical professionals can use to improve the quality of the care they deliver. In this e-book, I set forth the notion that the emerging field of geomedicine will produce a new type of medical intelligence that will leverage national spatial data infrastructures to benefit personal human health.
What Is Geomedicine?
At the present time, very little health-relevant geographic information is available to a clinician at the time of a medical diagnostic encounter, and it is certainly not a typical part of a comprehensive medical record. Geomedicine uses modern information technology to deliver information on a patient’s potential environmental exposures into the hands of the clinician while they are in the examination room.
With geomedicine, we will experience an increase in the number of patients who benefit from a more precise clinical understanding of the links between their health and where they live, work, and play.
What Is GIS?
Geographic information system (GIS) technology integrates hardware, software, and data for capturing, managing, analyzing, and displaying all forms of geographically referenced information. GIS allows us to view, understand, question, interpret, and visualize data in many ways that reveal relationships, patterns, and trends in the form of maps, globes, reports, and charts. GIS helps us answer questions and solve problems by looking at data in a way that is quickly understood and easily shared.
GIS has long been used to monitor the health of the planet. With geomedicine, GIS is now being used to monitor the health of individuals. It makes sense, because the health of people depends on the heath of the planet—and that’s the basic idea behind geomedicine.
Geography and Personal Health In 2001, I was hit by a train. Not a real train—but it might as well have been! My train was a heart attack. When it happened, I thought, Why me? Why now? Why here? I thought I was in good health. I had followed the advice of many doctors, but still the train had hit me. As I worked through my crisis, I started thinking about the many factors that could have contributed to my heart attack and wondered why I had not had better warning.
Having worked in and around health care for many years, I had learned a great deal about how to avoid a heart attack—you know, the usual things: avoid risks, live a healthy lifestyle, control my weight, choose better food and drink, don’t smoke, reduce stress . . . all excellent advice to a reasonable person.
Like many of you, I had provided a lot of personal information to my health care providers over many years, such as family, medication, surgical, disease, allergy, and social history as well as my lifestyle inventory. I now wondered why none of that information had actually helped prevent the roaring train bearing down on me.
I soon began to discover that there were many different reasons why I may have been hit by that train. In addition to all the usual suspects—high blood pressure, high cholesterol, stress, genetics—I discovered that many environmental conditions and exposures could greatly increase my risk of a heart attack, things like air quality and exposures to pollutants—some that I did not even know existed in the communities where I lived. As I began to research the places where I had lived both as a child and an adult, I began to discover disturbing information on what I—and Watch my presentation my doctors—could have already known about the quality of my various environments and what the impact may have been on my health.
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