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Delivering GIS Capabilities

Since John Snow’s original map charting London Cholera cases, geographic analysis of data has been a core capability for the practice of public health.  Geographic analysis has, however, been a gap in the standard functionality in the CDC’s NEDSS Base System (NBS), requiring jurisdictions to manage their own external processes for exporting and analyzing NBS surveillance information in geospatial tools.  This time-intensive and error-prone process limits the effectiveness of geospatial analysis for data collected by the NBS.

InductiveHealth was engaged earlier this year by the District of Columbia Department of Health to solve this problem to enable rapid geo-analysis and mapping of public health surveillance data.  This has involved an automated integration with the District’s centralized ArcGIS and Google Maps installations, providing automated geo-coding of NBS case information and an integrated geographic mapping view for cases managed by the DC NBS instance.  This week InductiveHealth completed the Implementation Phase for our main deliverables for this contract and we hope to demonstrate these new capabilities to the broader NBS community in the near future.

Stay tuned for more exciting updates in this area!

 

 

 

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InductiveHealth on Big Data

InductiveHealth’s Managing Director, Matthew Dollacker, was recently covered in a piece by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s New Public Health Blog.  The article focused on key topics from Matthew’s recent APHA talk on big data in the public health arena.

Though highly-structured, coded data will continue to be a mainstay in public health and healthcare, there is an ongoing revolution taking place in the use of extremely large, semi-structured and unstructured data sets to gather new insights through advanced machine learning techniques.

InductiveHealth is at the forefront of this revolution, which promises to transform the information tools available to public health institutions.

From the article:

“Data production will be 44 times greater in 2020 than it was in 2009,” said Dollacker. “And those who are positioned to take advantage of this data explosion are those that are aware of it, can access it, and can handle it.” …

 

Dollacker highlighted a couple of recent examples that show the potential big data has for public health. One instance was the Google Flu project – merely based on what users were searching on google.com, the search engine was able to take that data and help predict flu outbreaks at a regional and city level – ahead of official sources.

 

“What this highlights,” said Dollacker, “is the tremendous value that is sitting out there in data right now. Who would have thought we could have address this issue by looking at nothing more than existing search terms?”