Press Release SAVI Helps Public Health Community Make Advances
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Clinicians and researchers will soon have access to geospatially enabled medical records that will directly and immediately impact the public health community. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently funded the creation of the Indiana Center of Excellence in Public Health Informatics (ICEPHI). Indianapolis-based SAVI will be on the forefront of this project by developing web services that convert patient addresses to geographic coordinates allowing a linkage between community data and patient data in the Indiana Network for Patient Care (INPC).
"By integrating geospatial and community contextual data into the health information exchange, we can expand our ability to identify and address community and geographic factors that influence population health, including real- and near-real time identification and visualization of public health events and outcomes," Indiana University Assistant Professor of Family Medicine Dr. Shaun Grannis said. "Providing public health practitioners, researchers, and informaticians with efficient access to these data, in conjunction with existing health information exchange clinical data, will improve public health practice and the overall health of Hoosiers."
Health professionals will have ready access to SAVI data to assist with public health research and healthcare resource allocation. "This spatially enabling of medical records will enable the rich, community contextual and compositional datasets of SAVI to be linked to patient records," Polis Director of Collaborative Research Karen Comer said. "This will streamline clinicians' and researchers' ability to investigate spatial relationships between the social and physical environments, health behaviors and health outcomes."
SAVI has also partnered with the Indiana University School of Medicine to serve on the executive and community coordinating committees of the Community Health Engagement Program (CHEP) of the Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (Indiana CTSI). SAVI will provide its database of information to assist the CTSI to achieve the overall goal of enhancing statewide community participation in clinical and translational research - the process by which lab research translates into patient treatment, thus improving the health of Indiana residents and other states.
"SAVI has been vital to ongoing CHEP efforts to design and develop tools for integrating and presenting data that are relevant to local issues," Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Indiana University School of Medicine Ronald Ackermann M.D. said. "This is being done in a way that should help community and academic partners to be even more informed about key facts and relationships that are specific to geographic regions, populations or organizations in central Indiana and beyond. Community profiles developed from SAVI data have already proved instrumental in helping several community-academic partnerships, and we are optimistic that this involvement will continue to become increasingly rich and productive over the next several years."
SAVI's work with the public health research community captured the attention of The Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation, which has funded data acquisition and technological advancements over the past few years. SAVI was recently awarded $200,000 to apply towards additional data and technological advancements during 2010-2011. This was on top of $365,000 dollars received for 2008-2009."
"The Richard M. Fairbanks Foundation has long been a strong supporter of SAVI and has partnered with us in recent years to greatly enhance the public health data in SAVI including the addition of datasets related to hospitalizations, Medicare utilization, physician availability, vital statistics, communicable diseases and birth defects in Central Indiana," Interim SAVI Project Manager at The Polis Center Jay Colbert said. "We value the Foundation's support as we continue to work with the public health community to enhance the quality and usefulness of health-related data for Central Indiana communities." Fairbanks funded the SAVI processing of the data used in the map below showing the number of family practice physicians by primary care service area.
The SAVI Community Information System is the nationšs largest spatially-enabled system of its type, providing local organizations, researchers, and involved citizens with the detailed, geographically precise information needed to make well-informed decisions. Created by The Polis Center at IUPUI, SAVI contains a wealth of free data about the social, physical, and economic conditions of Central Indiana communities from counties to neighborhoods and census tracts, as well as information on thousands of non-profit and community-based organizations and programs. SAVI is a donor-supported, Web-based, interactive system that allows users to create custom maps, graphs, charts, and data profiles of over 2,000 Central Indiana communities. For more information, visit www.savi.org.
SAVI Press Release by Ryne Meadors at Trendy Minds |
