| Title: | GIS Use in Public Health Cancer Surveillance: A Custom Tool Demonstration |
| Authors: | Chris Gorwood, Braden Miller, Mass Dept of Public Health, Bureau of Environmental Health |
| Date/Time: | Wednesday, September 24 ~ 10:30 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. |
| Abstract: | In order to facilitate the analysis of perceived cancer clusters in response to public requests for community assessment the Community Assessment Program (CAP) in the Bureau of Environmental Health (BEH) of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (MDPH) worked with the BEH GIS staff and an outside contractor to create a custom desktop tool using ESRI's ArcMap to provide automated calculations of Standardized Incidence Ratios (SIR) at both town and census tract level geographies. An SIR compares the actual number of cases for a given place and time to the number that would be expected based on cancer rates in a comparison area, the entire state in this case. The SIR Calculator displays the results of each custom query in a simple choropleth map and is a great improvement over the older analytical methods, which involved complex Excel-based calculations and mapping by hand. The integration of these calculations into a GIS based platform allows for faster analysis and gives the CAP staff the ability to visualize their query results along with any other relevant spatial data, including individual diagnoses geocoded to the street level. |
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