Environmental Health Screening With Gis: Creating A Community Environmental Health Profile

In many communities, healthcare providers, public health officials, community groups, and individual citizens are concerned about potential connections between the environment and public health. The relationship between health outcomes and the environment is complex, and information in the form of a community profile can help concerned parties begin to understand how the environment may be affecting public health. For this study, a profile was created with data on population and economic characteristics, environmental sources, and public health outcomes. The data were drawn from local, state, and national sources in a geographic information system (GIS) format. A critical Component of this process was the collection of patient household data with an environmental health exposure form. The form was developed in a pilot project supported by file U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. A community environmental health profile could be used on a limited basis for hypothesis building and as a catalyst for obtaining more information about individual patients, families, or neighborhoods. General relationships between the environment and health outcome data could be observed, and suggestions made for follow-up analyses and studies. Health care providers and public health officials could use data obtained from a GIS-based profile, along with data gathered from patients, to examine potential environmental exposures in a community and to justify screening tests or other interventions. In addition, profiling of neighborhoods according to environment-related health outcomes could help with medical diagnosis and treatment.