Major applications for GIS in Health Geography:

1. Spatial epidemiology

   • It concerns with describing and understanding spatial variation in disease risk.

   • This approach focuses on individual level data or counts for small community areas so that it can provide a qualitative answer to explain the relationship between the environment and health outcome.

   • One example is geographical correlation studies, which examines the geographical variation in exposure to environmental variables (air, water, soil, etc.) and their association with health outcomes.

2. Environmental hazards

   • Environmental hazards involve three types of surveillance: hazard surveillance, exposure surveillance, and outcome surveillance.

3. Modeling health services

   • An example of modeling health service is ARIA, which stands for Accessibility/ Remoteness Index of Australia. This index helps examine the accessibility to any type of service by the population.  

4. Identifying health inequalities

 

Epidemiology

• Epidemiology is the study of the distribution and determinants of health and disease-related states in populations and the application of this study to control health problems.

• Quantifying disease occurrence

  • To study disease, we need to measure its occurrence.

  • Some method of measuring include counts, prevalence, incidence, and mortality.

  • Prevalence measures all cases, no matter how long diseased. It is most useful for resource allocation. Incidence only measures the new cases and is best applicable for measuring the risk of a particular disease. Mortality rate records the number of deaths in a one-year interval (if it is annual mortality rate). It can be further divided according to age, gender, race, etc.