GIS Analysis of Health Disparities

This book establishes a systematic small area approach to the study of health disparities, based on the integration of geospatial databases, census tract geography and GIS. While recognizing the past failures of health care policies to fully address the often egregious disparities within the U.S. and other nations, the opportunity now exists to advance our understanding, imporvement and, perhaps ultimately, elimination of these long-standing imbalances. The contributions of this book are scholarly and original work that incorporate GIS and related spatial analytic methods to pursue issues of health disparity at census tract geography. The objectives of this book are to: continue the growing science worldwide on socio-economic and health inequalities; provide evidence of the pivotal role of small area analysis for GIS and policy makers; build a valid basis for employing census tract and comparable geographic scale; demonstrate replicable methods of space-time measurement and GIS visualization; evaluate strengths and weaknesses of case studies and comparability to one another; and, assess future needs for GIS study of inequalities in lower socio-economic groups.