ArticleJournal of preventive medicine and hygiene2015
Geocoding health data with Geographic Information Systems: a pilot study in northeast Italy for developing a standardized data-acquiring format.
Article in Journal of preventive medicine and hygiene, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Socioeconomic and environmental factors associated with glaucoma in an African Ancestry Population: findings from the Primary Open-Angle African American Glaucoma Genetics (POAAGG) study.Eye (London, England) · 2025Article
- Association of socio-economic deprivation with COVID-19 incidence and fatality during the first wave of the pandemic in Italy: lessons learned from a local register-based study.International journal of health geographics · 2023Article
- Beyond Usual Geographical Scales of Analysis: Implications for Healthcare Management and Urban Planning.Portuguese journal of public health · 2023Article
- The influence of socio-environmental determinants on hypertension. A spatial analysis in Athens metropolitan area, Greece.Journal of preventive medicine and hygiene · 2020Article
- Accuracy of two geocoding methods for geographic information system-based exposure assessment in epidemiological studies.Environmental health : a global access science source · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
introductionGeographic Information Systems (GIS) have become an innovative and somewhat crucial tool for analyzing relationships between public health data and environment. This study, though focusing on a Local Health Unit of northeastern Italy, could be taken as a benchmark for developing a standardized national data-acquiring format, providing a step-by-step instructions on the manipulation of address elements specific for Italian language and traditions.
methodsGeocoding analysis was carried out on a health database comprising 268,517 records of the Local Health Unit of Rovigo in the Veneto region, covering a period of 10 years, starting from 2001 up to 2010. The Map Service provided by the Environmental Research System Institute (ESRI, Redlands, CA), and ArcMap 10.0 by ESRI(®) were, respectively, the reference data and the GIS software, employed in the geocoding process.
resultsThe first attempt of geocoding produced a poor quality result, having about 40% of the addresses matched. A procedure of manual standardization was performed in order to enhance the quality of the results, consequently a set of guiding principle were expounded which should be pursued for geocoding health data. High-level geocoding detail will provide a more precise geographic representation of health related events.
conclusionsThe main achievement of this study was to outline some of the difficulties encountered during the geocoding of health data and to put forward a set of guidelines, which could be useful to facilitate the process and enhance the quality of the results. Public health informatics represents an emerging specialty that highlights on the application of information science and technology to public health practice and research. Therefore, this study could draw the attention of the National Health Service to the underestimated problem of geocoding accuracy in health related data for environmental risk assessment.
Indexed as
Identifiers
26789994PMC4718356What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.