Geospatial Technologies for Public Health Management System

Geospatial technologies have made significant progress in data capturing, storing, analyzing, managing and presenting spatially referenced data in attending various applications. Many environmental conditions affect people’s health. The distribution of wetland may affect the dispersion of Malaria, while the groundwater aquifer and the location of solid or waste dumping sites may impact the drinking water quality which, in turn, affects the residents’ health. Thus, geospatial technologies and tools would facilitate public health policy formulation and planning, implementation and monitoring of appropriate interventions by regulatory authorities. In this technical paper, efforts are made to focus on the health care system in the patients. Geospatial analytical techniques such as proximity estimations and cluster analysis are built on statistical methods that incorporate distance and direction measurement to generate geospatially accurate maps and graphics reports. Disease clustering is classified as temporal clustering, spatial clustering, etc. These are examples of tools and technologies that can be made applicable to public health management. The authors have tried to address the following issues in this paper, where the use of geospatial technologies has a big role to provide a better health management system. The important issues are: Methods for disease and risk mapping; Spatial patterns of diseases; Hotspot detection of diseases; Spatial diffusion of disease outbreak; Roadmap for spatial epidemiological model; Geospatial analysis and visualization; Geospatial public health interoperability; Location-based hazard vulnerability assessment, etc. All the above issues have been properly carried out as part of the network project on the health GIS as one of the applications of geospatial technology under the NRDMS programme.