Mapping a Lifetime of Health Risks
Waking up in the hospital after a heart attack, Bill Davenhall, a health-care manager with the geographic information systems software developer Esri, wondered whether the disease that nearly took his life might have been predicted by the pollution he’d been exposed to since birth.
He put his GIS skills to work, mapping his proximity to coal mining pollution growing up in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Then, he added the Midwestern industrial emissions and Los Angeles smog he breathed regularly in later years. When he cross-referenced those pollutants to their known health risks and mortality data, a connection to his heart troubles emerged.
Since then, he has traveled the globe speaking to audiences and advising governments on geo-medicine, an emerging field that uses GIS mapping to correlate environmental conditions to health risks like heart attacks and cancer. Geo-medicine can zoom in on a patient’s life to create a geographically enhanced medical history. Or it can zoom out to give public health officials, city planners and activists detail-rich insights on how to improve the well-being of entire communities.
"It all starts with geographic precision. In the past that had no value except to the billing office,” says Davenhall, whose company offers a free iPhone app to help people map their lifetime environmental exposures.
He's currently working with Loma Linda University Medical Center, 60 miles east of Los Angeles, to geo-code patient address records. “What we are trying to do is show how where you work and play impacts your health,” says Dora Barilla, an assistant professor at Loma Linda University's School of Public Health. She sees real-time address verification as a first step toward improving individual care and overall community health among the 4 million people the teaching hospital serves.
Some doctors are skeptical. They question the value of tracking pollutants that, say, cause lung cancer, when there is currently no preventative screening to catch cases before symptoms appear. Other critics expect it will lead to more lawsuits. Privacy concerns have also been raised.