Abstract
BackgroundSpatial epidemiological analyses primarily depend on spatially-indexed medical records. Some countries have devised ways of capturing patient-specific spatial details using ZIP codes, postcodes or personal numbers, which are geocoded. However, for most resource-constrained African countries, the absence of a means to capture patient resident location as well as inexistence of spatial data infrastructures makes capturing of patient-level spatial data unattainable.MethodsThis paper proposes and demonstrates a creative low-cost solution to address the issue. The solution is based on using interoperable web services to capture fine-scale locational information from existing “spatial data pools” and link them to the patients’ information.ResultsBased on a case study in Uganda, the paper presents the idea and develops a prototype for a spatially-enabled health registry system that allows for fine-level spatial epidemiological analyses.ConclusionIt has been shown and discussed that the proposed solution is feasible for implementation and the collected spatially-indexed data can be used in spatial epidemiological analyses to identify hotspot areas with elevated disease incidence rates, link health outcomes to environmental exposures, and generally improve healthcare planning and provisioning.
Highlights
Spatial epidemiological analyses primarily depend on spatially-indexed medical records
Spatial data pools in this study are defined as spatial data that have already been collected by different organizations and for other purposes but can be reused for another purpose – for spatial location of patients in our case. By linking this data to patient information, the patient information is georeferenced. We address this idea through developing a prototype system using lightweight web services technologies and mobile-based Geographical Information System (GIS) to create a patient registry system that enables recording of such fine-scale patient spatial data, upon hospital/healthcare centre admissions
Currently, there are three main health registry systems implemented by the Ministry of Health (MoH) in Uganda
Summary
Spatial epidemiological analyses primarily depend on spatially-indexed medical records. Given that epidemiology is concerned with disease patterns in human populations as opposed to individuals [2], and that these populations tend to inhabit space in non-homogeneous ways, the resulting disease patterns are often nonhomogeneous and spatially-dependent [3] Spatial heterogeneity in both disease risk and disease incidence at fine-spatial scales is well documented and is Different countries have devised different mechanisms to enable the capture of fine-scale spatial details of persons. These include the use of postcodes for the UK, ZIP codes for the USA, and personal numbers for Scandinavian countries [4], to mention but a few. These spatial positions are used in epidemiological analyses to identify where disease incidents are common
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