While much of the world is using the technology to map everything from real estate transactions to bike-sharing stations these days, San Bernardino, Calif. is mapping illness and cross-referencing it against the locations of “food deserts”, crime hotspots, and recreational areas.
A recent AlterNet.com article reported that San Bernardino, a city on outskirts of Los Angeles, is a "food desert." For every grocery store, the city has eight fast-food joints and convenience stores along with heart disease, lung cancer and diabetes rates and a life expectancy eight years shorter than the average Californian.
With serious health issues and not many recreational facilities, San Bernardino has low state quality of life rankings, so it decided to use GIS or "geographic information systems" to fix this unhealthy problem.
"It's one thing to know what a food desert is. But to see it on the map is totally different," said Cynthia Luna, who leads San Bernardino's Latino Health Collaborative, one of the advocacy groups that work to improve the resident health.
The project in San Bernardino is part of the burgeoning new field of "geo-medicine," which emphasizes that place affects health. The technology is not brand new as before it was discovered by the real estate site, Zillow, the fossil fuel industry has been using GIS mapping to explore for the next big oil field, but the tools have matured recently.
As they've gotten better at turning knowledge in databases into user-friendly soundbites and infographics, public health officials have started to embrace them.
The trend is also introducing an era of "citizen epidemiologists," according to Bill Davenhall, a healthcare manager with the geographic information systems software developer Esri. Experiments are underway around the US to pair geo-mapping with patient medical records to help doctors personalize treatment.
At Loma Linda Medical Center Esri is installing geo-coding software that verifies patient addresses. Dora Barilla, the center's director of community health development, envisions computer dashboards that allow doctors and care providers to see where a patient lives and what kind of neighborhood stores and social services they could use after discharge from the hospital, such as locating pharmacies or farmers markets within walking distance or helping elderly patients enroll in public transit services to get them to doctor's appointments.
One new company, Asthmapolis, has attached a GPS sensor atop asthma inhalers to allow patients and doctors to track attacks and gain insight into what triggers them. Once the data is "de-identified" to protect patient privacy, it will be sent to researchers investigating the condition.
The first step is coaxing public officials into conversation about community health problems and how to reduce obesity-related deaths and improve physical fitness, according to Angelica Baltazar, an Ersi executive who spent five years coordinating Healthy San Bernardino.
The public health crusade has already made progress in improving the county's health. This year, San Bernadino moved up the ranks from 50th to 46th place examined by the County Health Rankings, a national GIS-powered project that compares counties across 28 different indicators of health. Mark Hoffman, who authored the city of San Bernardino's environmental scan, said it took hundreds of hours to build accurate database that contributed to the report.
"We tapped just about every government entity to pull this information together. The databases didn't exist. It all had to be coded and double- and triple-checked," said Hoffman. While they can be time-consuming and costly (Luna estimates the scan cost between $30,000 and $50,000), these detailed reports can help communities recruit allies in an efforts to improve community health and quality of life.
For now, the city's advocates have started small: working to expand parks activities, walking clubs, farmers markets and community gardens. Eventually, they hope to tackle bigger issues like the rewriting the zoning rules to encourage more walkable neighborhoods, expand bike lanes and otherwise encourage a more physically active citizenry.
Said Luna: "Our mission is to connect the dots between programs and then coordinate them and really create a vision. If we can do this, then we will have something that's long lasting."
Edited by
Braden Becker
