Linking electronic health record (EHR) systems with community information systems (CIS) holds great promise for addressing inequities in social determinants of health (SDH). While EHRs are rich in location-specific data that allow us to uncover geographic inequities in health outcomes, CIS are rich in data that allow us to describe community-level characteristics relating to health. When meaningfully integrated, these data systems enable clinicians, researchers, and public health professionals to actively address the social etiologies of health disparities.This article describes a process for exploring SDH by geocoding and integrating EHR data with a comprehensive CIS covering a large metropolitan area. Because the systems were initially designed for different purposes and had different teams of experts involved in their development, integrating them presents challenges that require multidisciplinary expertise in informatics, geography, public health, and medicine. We identify these challenges and the means of addressing them and discuss the significance of the project as a model for similar projects.
In 2012, the Virtual Center for Spatial Humanities (VCSH) held an advanced institute in Indianapolis, Indiana, on spatial narratives and deep maps. Sponsored by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a U.S. government agency that funds humanities research, the institute invited twelve scholars -seven from the U.S. and five from Europe -whose work at the intersection of digital technologies and their disciplinary domains (history, religious studies, literary studies, geography and geographic information science, archaeology, and museum studies) promised to advance an institute aim of re-envisioning the theories and technologies of spatialization to serve the needs of humanities research more completely.Rather than asking humanists to adopt unabridged geo-spatial technologies, such as GIS, that are based on positivist epistemologies often ill-suited to the humanities, the institute focused on a range of available geospatial technologies including GIS, geo-visualization, the geospatial semantic web, wiki-maps and mash-ups, social media and mapping systems, spatialized tag clouds, and selforganizing maps. Powerful as maps are, the institutes proposed to link and deepen scholarly understanding of complex humanities data and geospatial technologies through a focus on two innovative forms -spatial narratives and deep maps -that bend spatial and other digital technologies to the intellectual traditions of humanists, thereby constituting a bridge between diverse avenues of investigation. In doing so, it addressed two goals of the NEH call for proposals, namely, to bring together humanists and technologists to advance an innovative approach to the digital humanities and to assess the tools and methods available to support it.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.