I’m on the latest episode of Prognosis Ohio, a podcast about health and healthcare in Ohio. We talk infrastructure bill, scooters, Ubers, public transit, walking and health care access.
Scooters, Ubers, and Automobiles: Sustainable Transportation with Prof. Harvey Miller
New paper: Li, Y., Hyder, A., Southerland, L.T., Hammond, G., Porr, A. and Miller, H.J. “311 service requests as indicators of neighborhood distress and opioid use disorder,” Scientific Reports, 10, 19579.
Opioid use disorder and overdose deaths is a public health crisis in the United States, and there is increasing recognition that its etiology is rooted in part by social determinants such as poverty, isolation and social upheaval. Limiting research and policy interventions is the low temporal and spatial resolution of publicly available administrative data such as census data. We explore the use of municipal service requests (also known as “311” requests) as high resolution spatial and temporal indicators of neighborhood social distress and opioid misuse. We analyze the spatial associations between georeferenced opioid overdose event (OOE) data from emergency medical service responders and 311 service request data from the City of Columbus, OH, USA for the time period 2008–2017. We find 10 out of 21 types of 311 requests spatially associate with OOEs and also characterize neighborhoods with lower socio-economic status in the city, both consistently over time. We also demonstrate that the 311 indicators are capable of predicting OOE hotspots at the neighborhood-level: our results show code violation, public health, and street lighting were the top three accurate predictors with predictive accuracy as 0.92, 0.89 and 0.83, respectively. Since 311 requests are publicly available with high spatial and temporal resolution, they can be effective as opioid overdose surveillance indicators for basic research and applied policy.
Epidemics and pandemics such as the COVID-19 outbreak have clear geographic dimensions due to the vector spreading the virus (human contact), demographics and co-morbidity factors that vary geographically, the distributed and heterogeneous nature of health care systems, and the highly variable response and interventions from political authorities and the public-at-large. The decline and shifts in human activity also affect broader social, economic and environmental systems to varying degrees. Geospatial information can play vital roles in crafting effective government and societal responses at the operational, tactical and strategic levels.
On 17 June 2020, the Mapping Science Committee of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine will host an online workshop on Geospatial Needs for a Pandemic-Resilient World. This workshop will explore the needs of federal agencies, organizations, and scientists for geospatial data science to understand and respond to epidemics/pandemics and developing infrastructure and policies that facilitate effective management and graceful recovery from these types of shocks. This workshop is free and open to the public.