Geomedicine: including geography history as part of patient medical history

Links: 

http://www.esri.com/industries/health/geomedicine/index.html

Group Name: 
PTPH
Heather Glock
Problem: 

Today, medical records contain information primarily about genetics and lifestyle choices. Location-based factors, such as growing up in an industrial town, are not collected as part of the patient medical history. Information about where a patient has lived his/her life could provide very good indicator information about overall health tendencies and risks.

Context: 

Most people move around during their lives. For example, someone might grow up in a steel town in Pennsylvania, then move to Los Angeles for college, and finally to a small town in Colorado for a career. When compared to someone who spent most of their life in a rural community, the industry/heavy city person might be at higher risk for say, heart disease than the person who lives primarily in a rural environment.

Discussion: 

Medicine is making advances towards painting a more holistic picture of health for individuals. One factor that should be included is a history of where a person has lived. This information can be combined with the commonly collected genetic and lifestyle information to offer a better picture of health and more accurate indications of future disease or areas of concern. This information could help people create more awareness about own health. A real world example of this is an online application available through mapping company ESRI: http://www.esri.com/industries/health/geomedicine/index.html here, for example, one can enter in locations where they've lived in the U.S. and see information about sources of health pollution that are nearby (such as a factory or Superfund cleanup site). Exposure to these sorts of toxins has been linked with heart disease later in life. A drawback of factoring in geography to an overall health picture is that, like other health factors, individual outcomes will vary. It is important to keep in mind that factoring in geography should be treated as just one overall factor in the big picture of public health. In other words, just because you grew up in a heavily industrial area doesn't mean that you'll end up with heart disease. The benefts of applying geography to health is that in provides another indicator to use in compiling a more accurate health picture.

Solution: 

We should push for including geography as part of our medical history. Currently, doctors ask their patients for informaiton regarding genetics (e.g., anyone in your family have a history of breast cancer...) and lifestyle choices (e.g., do you exercise regularly?). Having historical information about living locations can help create a more comprehensive picture of overall health, which in turn could help better define preventative actions one could take to ensure a more healthy future.

Reference: 
http://www.esri.com/industries/health/geomedicine/index.html
Verbiage for pattern card: 

Today, medical records contain information primarily about genetics and lifestyle choices. Location-based factors, such as growing up in an industrial town, are not collected as part of the patient medical history. Information about where a patient has lived his/her life could provide very good indicator information about overall health tendencies and risks.

We should push for including geography as part of our medical history. Currently, doctors ask their patients for informaiton regarding genetics (e.g., anyone in your family have a history of breast cancer...) and lifestyle choices (e.g., do you exercise regularly?). Having historical information about living locations can help create a more comprehensive picture of overall health, which in turn could help better define preventative actions one could take to ensure a more healthy future.

Pattern status: 
Draft