Health Care and GIS: Personal Security vs. Democratization of Data

The national debate on health care, its costs, and disease prevention gets little mention with respect to GIS. If you are interested in this issue, you should visit the website of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention that is specific to GIS. You’ll find lots of resources. You might also think about attending ESRI’s Health GIS conference this October or an international GIS conference in Bangkok next January. Now also comes word that both Google and Microsoft are entering the health care debate.

It seems that both companies want to offer pieces of the technology puzzle. Today’s New York Times has an article about the intentions of each company and it notes that, "By combining better Internet search tools, the vast resources of the Web and online personal health records, both companies are betting they can enable people to make smarter choices about their health habits and medical care." While this may seem disconnected from any discussion of geospatial data, you can imagine what might be possible and scary should personal health records become public. Or, it might be a weath of information for health care policy makers or disease prevention analysts looking to pinpoint disease outbreaks and plan for the next flu epidemic. Think, too, about helping people find the right physician and linking the location of those experts with the patients that need that knowledge. It can work in reverse as well for physicians looking to advertise their services to a select group of people with certain diseases or, better yet, certain disease traits and history.

The area of health care and the potential to map disease, DNA traits, and linking this to geospatial search is perhaps just beginning. Start with the CDC’s web site on web applications and I think you will see that much work is already being done in trying to get information to the public.