An Automated 3D Mapping process (courtesy NPHG technology).  

Recent results of a new technology for spatial medical cartography that I developed, requiring minimal engagement at the IT developer’s end, including an elimination of time requirements related to the development of videos

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We are in the initial stages of implementing GIS for managed care based population health monitoring.  There are a number of software programs out there than enable you to include maps in the displays or presentations you develop as part of the monitoring process of your workstation.  As leaders in the field, the production of “dashboards”, “scorecards” and “reports” have enabled us to increase our understanding of the population we serve and develop the knowledgebase needed to better manage the various types of healthcare programs we provide.

Surveillance is a major reason to establish as GIS workstation that has specific public health and population health and safety related metrics defined.  Most of the uses of GIS to date have been for research purposes, with a few projects actually evolving into standard intervention, health safety, health security and even cost effectiveness reviews of our programs.

There are literally thousands of conditions, events, diagnoses that fit the description of being important to national health security concerns.  Aside from the hundreds or more zoonotic and rare infectious diseases,  there are culturally linked and bound health conditions for which the knowledge of their notations in the EHR or EMR should lead to the raising of a “red flag.”

Included in these issues are those related to domestic violence, spouse or child related mistreatment, malnutrition, unsanitary living conditions, criminal activities, illegal or immoral seclusion to an inside home-setting, etc. etc.    This particular event is one of the most controversial to appear in the US EMR/EHR data.  Its controversy in part related to its reasons for practice, as well as its reasons for continuous practice in spite of international laws passed prohibiting it from being performed.

This new technology enables spatial analysts to define the sociological or sociocultural “hot spots” in health related issues.  The recent re-eruption of measles, the in-migration of mosquito-born diseases like zika, the possible planting of new forms of food-spread antibiotic resistant bacteria in certain parts of the U.S., the increasing density of certain culturally-linked genetic disease traits due to cultural growth, combined with the ongoing forming of you families with shared genetic traits, set the stage for the development of a medical GIS by all managed care institutions.  When such an HIT-GIS station is developed in association with the local public health program activities utilizing spatial health analytics tools, we develop a better understanding of our local population health, and can more quickly use this knowledge to monitor, survey and even predict the health changes expected for a region.