The past two decades have seen dramatic increases in the generation of geospatial data and the use of related tools and spatial methods in health research. From analyzing infectious disease outbreaks or cancer patterns, to modeling the impacts of environmental risks on substance abuse, these new methods, data, and technologies are transforming our understanding of environmental and social interactions with health. Achieving the full potential of new developments geographic information systems and science (GIScience) in health will require an interdisciplinary collaboration among geographers, biomedical scientists, and public health practitioners.
As health researchers now increasingly have access to highly detailed genetic and epigenetic information, there is a counter demand for more detailed and precise information about environmental context. This is where geography, with its emphasis on place, integrative science, and methods for spatially organizing and understanding coupled human and natural systems becomes essential. And where GIS, with its capacity to integrate and correlate vast amounts of detailed quantitative environmental data with observed conditions such as infectious diseases, cancer, obesity, mental illness, and addiction, becomes central to medical research and practice that aims to address complex genetic-environmental interactions in disease.
Further enabling new research frontiers in health are developments in spatial cyberinfrastructure using distributed computing architectures. It is now possible to invoke analysis and modeling services remotely to perform sophisticated spatial analysis, and to model complex spatial health processes at the level of the individual rather than the aggregate.
With the now ubiquitous GPS/GIS functionality in consumer devices, individual citizens are empowered to gather their own geospatial data, and participate in various online citizen-science health projects. Despite obvious issues of quality assurance, it is clear that crowd-sourcing and volunteered geographic information have fascinating potential for medical research and service delivery through the ability to access georeferenced data-gathering by millions of volunteers. Advances in spatial analytical methods for mining and interpretation of these data will be integral to implementing promising new approaches to health service delivery, including mHealth (mobile health services) and electronic medical records, and in addressing issues of accessibility to health care and persistent global health disparities.
The AAG, working with leading geospatial health scientists from around the world, has formed a new organization, the International Geospatial Health Research Network (IGHRN), to share new research in geospatial health methods and technologies, to foster international collaborations and synergies across borders, and to bridge the gap between GIScience health research and the needs of health practitioners on the ground.
The stakes are high. In addition to growing health challenges in controlling traditional and newly evolving diseases, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates just urged the US to lead the fight against lethal pandemics, noting that we are falling short in preparing the world for the “significant probability of a large and lethal modern-day pandemic.” It is imperative that we advance and implement new spatial health research, methods and infrastructure to address these health challenges.
The collaborations underway between the AAG and organizations around the world also suggest that we need new institutional and educational models for successfully integrating geographical and spatial dimensions more fully into heath research and practice. Public policies and institutional initiatives that foster the incorporation of spatial data and analysis in global health research and practice hold extraordinary potential for creating new discovery pathways in health research and new efficiencies in health services delivery.
For more information, visit www.IGHRN.org, or to engage these issues more deeply, consider participating in the International Geospatial Health Research special symposium, to be held during of the AAG Annual Meeting in Washington, DC, from April 3-8, 2019.
by Dr. Doug Richardson
This article was originally published at ARCNEWS.
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