Internet GIS solution for Bermuda’s Environmental Health Department
Bermuda's Environmental Health Data System (BEHDS)
Introduction
Spatial information has long been recognized as being of great benefit to Environmental
Health in general. However, until recently, major data collection efforts in environmental
health rarely utilized Geographic Information Systems (GIS) on a regular basis. Reasons
that explain the limited use of GIS in Environmental Health include:
- GIS technology had not been developed enough to address security concerns,
hardware limitations and other technologically limiting factors in Environmental
Health.
- For most of its history, developed GIS technology has required highly specialized
technical skills not commonly found in Environmental Health departments.
- Environmental Health programs do not usually have a clearly spelled out mandate
to collect and use spatial information.
- Researchers were reluctant to adapt proven statistical methodologies to the spatial
realm. Questions of data origin and validity prevented a more widespread usage
of the available methods incorporating spatial statistics.
Recent developments and advances in the industry that remove some of the above-mentioned
barriers, and therefore, enable a more widespread usage of GIS include:
- The GIS technology for desktop and networks has become affordable, more
secure, user-friendlier, requiring less training, and is loaded with tools for
statistical analysis bridging the gap between traditional statistics and spatial
statistics.
- The demands that Environmental Health faces have changed and are changing
rapidly:
- Prevention and outreach play an important role in Environmental Health. The
public is familiar with maps from the media and other exposures and expects
similar forms of communication from a public health department.
- Response times for Environmental Health issues have shortened. (e.g. to
BioTerrorism threats and events).
- Inter-programmatic and inter-agency collaboration and data exchange is required
more often than ever before.
Addressing and reflecting these developments in a modern and spatially enabled
Environmental Health information technology structure requires a certain work
environment and some changes to how environmental health data collection is
approached:
- Spatial data need to be integrated and constantly collected (and subjected to
quality assurance procedures) in any programmatic data collection effort. As an
example, address data could be verified by an address cleaning and geocoding
tool at the time of data entry to provide immediate feedback to the data entry staff.
- Environmental Health management needs to encourage the use of maps in daily
reporting and analysis across all programmatic groups in a department.
- Funding for infrastructure, training, and development of GIS tools need to be
budgeted on a consistent basis.
- GIS interfaces need to be seamlessly integrated into any appropriate public health
application, so that all public health staff work with maps, not just mapping
specialists. (Fiedler et. al., 2000)
