Google Maps System Enhancement for the Tasmanian Web-Based Epidemiology System

Description

Modern epidemiologists use disease informatics as a tool to identify health care needs. Health researchers have been pursuing a mechanism for a more convenient and effective means of communicating complex information based on geographic visualization for many years. The Population Health Epidemiology Unit of the Department of Health Services (DHHS) in Tasmania use hospitalizations, deaths, cancer incidence and notifiable disease data to conduct monitoring and surveillance of the health of the Tasmanian population. The Tasmanian Web-Based Epidemiology System aims for epidemiology data management and visualization and decision making by using Google Maps technology.

Sponsor

The Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) is the largest State Government agencies of Tasmania. The Department is responsible for delivering integrated services that maintain and improve the health and wellbeing of individual Tasmanians and the Tasmanian communities. The Department provides more than one and a half million occasions of service annually to clients. In addition to the services it provides directly, the Department also contracts or provides funding for a wide range of services within the private and non-government sectors.

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Significance

This project supports evidence-based policy making. As the Australian health care industry consumes multiple billion dollars each year and generates a vast quantity of electronic data, the needs for managing health data and for developing the tools, techniques, and strategies for this work have never been greater. This project addresses fundamental cross-disciplinary issues of information processing in distributed and multiple domains with direct applications in healthcare, and bridge the gap between the research evidence and policy of healthcare.

Potential applications

Visualization of epidemiological information, species distribution, and job markets statistics, etc.

Research Team

Victoria University:

  • Professor  Yanchun Zhang (contact)
  • Professor  Ian Rouse
  • A/Professor Hao Shi
  • Ms. Jingyuan Zhang (PhD student)

Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), Tasmania

  • Dr. Peter Wan
  • Dr Kelly Shaw