The University of Michigan's Center for Geospatial Medicine will use a $9.8 million federal grant to study Type 2 diabetes in four under-served counties in North Carolina, Mississippi and West Virginia. It focuses on those enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program.
"This will allow researchers to visualize complex relationships among the locations of diabetes patients, patterns of health care and available social resources," said Marie Lynn Miranda, dean of the U-M School of Natural Resources and Environment and director of the Center for Geospatial Medicine, in a news release. "The information will serve as the basis for intervention design, decision support and real-time monitoring of interventions."The U-M program is working with a multi-state research team to reduce death and disability from the most common form of the disease. The center uses spatially based methods for analyzing environmental threats to communities.
Duke is in on it, too.
A study of malaria used GIS to remove environmental factors to explore if the disease is related to poverty. Does malaria cause poverty? Or the other way round? Or is there no connection?
Results show that households with a child who tested positive for malaria at the time of the survey had a wealth index that was, on average, 1.9 units lower (p-value <0.001), and that an increase in the wealth index did not reveal significant effects on malaria.
As I understand it, that's correlation, not causation, at this point, but if there is a connection it could impact how intervention is attempted.
The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School held the “Your Big Ideas Challenge,” for Penn Medicine and selected 10 submissions for further development.
One team developed a schedule maker to help visitors schedule appointments with healthcare professionals and physicians, find out what they need to bring to their appointments and fill out pre-visit questionnaires to save time. They can also print maps of the campuses they are traveling to. Users can add themselves to waiting lists if they want to make appointments for specific times and can get email or text message reminders of their appointments.
Another team developed a patient kiosk system where visitors can identify where their appointments are, or visit friends or family and map out a paths to get there.
