Use of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) to enhance our understanding of the epidemiology of disease and the distribution and use of health and medical resources has increased rapidly in the last 5 years.
I started using geographic information experimentally in the late 1960s, while health director in Portsmouth, Virginia. I was assisted by Ruell Waldrop from the CDC's center for community services and John DeShaies of the Census Bureau's research center. I presented one of the first (if not the first) lecture on applications for mapping health problems and socio-demographics at the CDC's annual conference in 1972. These first maps were made by sticking dots onto a map of the city, with the census tracts shaded according to economic level, then photographing them. In 1980, while health director in Corpus Christi, Texas, I wrote my own software with Graphics-Basic to accomplish the same ends, without posting dots on maps ( see Maxcy Rosenau's textbook of preventive medicine, 12th or 13th edition, the chapter on local health department management. In 1982, concurrently with the advent of the IBM-PC a single user GIS software program called 'ATLAS-GIS' came on the market. I was one of the earliest users of this product in the health care field. While this product is till available, and one of the easiest to use programs that currently meets the need of most health agencies, its current owner, ESRI of California, has developed its flagship program for PC use: ArcView PC. This program is more expensive than Atlas, but has a multitude of features that allows more flexibility as well as producing enhancing presentation graphics. It is quite a bit more expensive, and has a fairly steep learning curve, which has just been improved with the availability of inter-active on-line learning modules available from ESRI. I particularly recommend ESRI's new FREE Introductory GIS Mapping for Health Professionals. You will probably have to create an account before you log-on the first time. The account is FREE!.
VCU now has training available for ArcView. Dr Shelley Harris and Andy Lacatell (a recent MPH program graduate) at VCU's Center for the Environment can provide additional information.
ESRI
Virtual Campus.
ESRI
Mapping our world
GIS
Mapping for Health Professionals
GIS
for Health & Human Services
WHO's GIS center
GIS Gateway
Census Bureau's Home Page
Directions
Magazine - Mapping (On-Line) Examples of PH Mapping.
CDC's EpiMap (this links
to ArcView -see above)
Updated GIS Links