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Diagnostic uncertainty and medical geography: what are we mapping?
Author(s) -
Yiannakoulias Nikolaos,
Svenson Lawrence W.,
Schopflocher Donald P.
Publication year - 2005
Publication title -
canadian geographer / le géographe canadien
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.35
H-Index - 46
eISSN - 1541-0064
pISSN - 0008-3658
DOI - 10.1111/j.0008-3658.2005.00096.x
Subject(s) - health geography , medical diagnosis , confounding , scale (ratio) , geography , representation (politics) , space (punctuation) , disease , data science , health care , regional science , cartography , medicine , public health , health policy , computer science , international health , pathology , political science , politics , law , operating system
The administration of the Canadian health care system requires the collection of large quantities of health data that some health researchers have used to map the spatial distribution of disease. The authors discuss the difficulty of separating genuine geographic variations in health and disease from geographic differences in how diseases are diagnosed, and how these diagnoses are represented in an administrative data system. Although there have been attempts to deal with this problem at the international scale, little research has considered the issue at intranational or intraprovincial scales. There are several strategies available that can help separate spatial patterns of disease from nonmedical confounders, though they remain largely untested in medical geography. Future research should consider the scale of the problem and the effectiveness of existing approaches in mitigating the effects of geographic diagnostic inconsistency on the representation of health statistics in space.