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The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
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The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
Marcia M. Sass, ScD1, Adrienne J. Headley, MD2, Mark C. Fulcomer, PhD3, Katherine Chung, MD2, Michelle LaRue4, Virginia Salvesen3, Jenny L. Clayton3, and Michael W. Holton3. (1) RESTAT Systems, Inc., 32 Rebecca Court, West Trenton, NJ 08628, (609) 771-9086, marciasass@aol.com, (2) Family Medicine, UMDNJ, One Robert Wood Johnson Place, P.O. Box 19, New Brunswick, NJ 08903-0019, (3) Public Health, Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, Jim Leeds Road, Pomona, NJ 08240-0195, (4) School of Public Health, UMDNJ, 40 East Laurel Road, Stratford, NJ 08084
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are increasingly viewed as offering substantial benefits in planning and deploying preventive health services. However, geographic distributions of adverse reproductive outcomes (AROs) such as prematurity, very low birth weight, and infant mortality may be unstable due to their “rareness” and limit the usefulness of GIS applications for sparsely-populated areas. While ARO indicators published in statistical reports sometimes hint at “significant” elevations, values are typically presented only for large areas such as entire counties, perhaps with the addition of a few large cities, and for short periods such as single years. Thus, despite growing interest in health disparities in general, and migrant health in particular, many well-known data sources may unintentionally “mask” elevations of ARO rates for smaller areas, further complicating efforts to design effective programs for some “hard-to-reach” populations.
However, by incorporating a large number of records (over 1 million New Jersey births, 7,830 infant deaths, and 7,233 fetal deaths) which were collected over a nine-year period (from 1989 to 1997) and geocoded at the census block-group level of detail, the current database overcomes commonly encountered difficulties. Summarization at the census block-group allows inspection of results for 7,970 distinct geographic areas. Thus, this study illustrates potential birth/delivery record applications of GIS in studying the distribution of AROs over time throughout the entire state, providing combined coverage not only for counties and other large cities (e.g., Newark, the largest of New Jersey’s 566 municipalities), but also for rural and other more sparsely-populated areas.
Learning Objectives: At the end of the session, the participant in this session will be able to
Keywords: Birth Outcomes, Geographic Information Systems
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.