GIS in Health Research and Health Care

A burgeoning area within the subdiscipline of medical geography, research on geographic information systems (GIS) and health has increased dramatically in recent years. Importantly, the use of GIS in health research has become common in areas outside geography, including public policy, public health, health informatics, and biomathematics, and in medical and nursing schools. GIS techniques are now embedded in health surveillance systems and are used to produce cartographic representations of disease distributions and patterns. In the arena of analysis, pattern and cluster analysis have been the primary techniques employed in most published research in GIS and health. Finally, cutting-edge GIS and health projects are experimenting with participatory GIS methods to improve simulated pandemic responses and early warning systems and to promote the adoption of critical ...