Public Health Reporting | Background

Health-related customers of InstantAtlas include multi-national agencies, national health departments, state health departments, regional and local public health authorities. This software has been adopted as a solution of choice by health agencies in the UK, US, Germany, Netherlands, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Chile and Argentina. Within US State Departments of Health it is being deployed in areas like BRFSS, Infectious Diseases, Maternal/Child Health, Vital Statistics, Cancer Registries and Injury Health. Departments of Health in thirteen US States are now using InstantAtlas.

InstantAtlas is a tool being used by health analysts, researchers, statisticians, epidemiologists, data managers and GIS experts to disseminate public health statistics and indicators where there is a need to communicate geographic patterns and trends to a wider audience. They are creating outputs aimed at a wide spectrum of end-users from specialist 'experts' (see the EMPHO Funnel Plot example) to 'lay users' (see WHO example on the right).

InstantAtlas outputs, termed 'dynamic reports', are commonly produced to complement static reports. In the UK for example, Primary Care Trusts are obligated to produce an annual public health report and many now use InstantAtlas as a way of delivering the intelligence behind the report in a graphical, interactive form via their web site (or even on a CD). This gives report readers the opportunity to explore the data behind the reports for themselves. It also provides a tool for monitoring the performance of health resources and presenting survey results.

InstantAtlas Desktop and Server have also been widely applied to support public health observatories at an international, national, regional and local scale. They are ideal tools for making this data widely available in a range of forms to meet different needs of end-users. As mentioned above the solution has been widely applied to the dissemination of health survey results - in particular the Behavioural Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), the world’s largest, on-going telephone health survey system annually tracking health conditions and risk behaviors in the United States. In South America InstantAtlas is being used by a number of government national health departments application particularly for monitoring the spread of pandemic diseases (see the example for Chile).

World Health Organization, A/H1N1 SwineFlu Global Map

(click on image to view)

Scale: Global

Purpose: presenting the latest statistics on the spread of the H1N1 virus. Directives are now being issued by international, national and local health agencies to plan for a significantly larger second wave of Influenza H1N1 anticipated as flu season commences in the Northern Hemisphere in Fall 2009

InstantAtlas Template: Single Map

Public Health Demonstrations

Creating an InstantAtlas Report: Community Health

Creating an InstantAtlas Report: Infectious Disease Mapping and Reporting