Abstract- While we have seen the wide use of other
information technologies in health services and management,
the use of geographic information technologies in health related
services has been limited so far. Given that location-related
data play important roles in many health related services, it is
anticipated that geographic information technologies have a lot
to offer in helping improve health related services, management,
and research. As an example, the authors report the
development of a geographic information system (GIS) for
Texas-Mexico border disease surveillance and environmental
health research. This presentation covers three important
aspects in the development of the GIS: (1) the specification of
uses and usem of the GIs and the associated data, products, and
functions; (2) a preliminary design of the data types and formats
in the GIS; and (3) a prototype of a GIS-based spatial search
tool that can be used to support environmental epidemiology
research. In some disease monitoring and environmental
epidemiology studies, it k often necessary to perform spatial
search to determine the distances between environmental
hazardous sites and the locations of cases and controls when
distance is used as measure of exposure. The GIS can be used to
interactivety and automatically determine the distance between
any possible pair of environmental hazardous sites and
casdcontrols. Preliminary results suggest that the prototype
GIS is indeed a powerful tool for spatial search when distance is
used as a measure of exposure in environmental health research.
The reported system should be useful to researchers facing
similar situations in disease monitoring and environmental
hedth research.
. Keywords: GIS; Spatial Analysis; Environmental Health;
Epidemiology; Disease Surveillance