Population Health Informatics

After the Second World War, development of socio-economy and advancement in science and technology have dramatically changed the global health situation and, consequently, have changed knowledge of human on environment-health issues. More emphasis are put on environmental factors, especially population, health and social context, while stresses on diseases itself are becoming fainter. Since the nineties of the last century, the core of environment-health studies has been transferred to improvement of well-being, health status and body function from the traditional disease controlling. A case in point is the Concept Frame of Population Health by Russell. Mapping, which had ever played an important role in analyzing the interrelation between diseases and environmental factors and revealing causation of epidemic, can not meet the need of environmental changes. GIS, for powerful captivities in multi-source data integration and spatial-temporal analysis, gradually takes the place of mapping and becomes a primary tool to help professionals resolving environment-health issues and to help officials of health to perform multi-level administrating, policy making and tasks planning. At present, applications of GIS in environment-health mainly focus on global and regional environment-health issues, where buffer zone analysis, spatial analysis and spatial-temporal analysis are the three main kinds of techniques frequently adopted. In the way of environment-health management, application of GIS still stays at the exploratory stage and lacks support of systematic theory with many limitations to be overcome. The primary three limitations are data quality, shortage of GIS technology and lack of GIS knowledge for researchers and officials. The data quality is the most serious problem confronted us. It is thus clear application of GIS to management and planning on environment-health is a fairly promising field, whose target will be to integrate GIS technology with other professional analysis tools to develop comprehensive environment health management information system.