The Health 2.0 Middle East - Dubai conference, to be held on Jan. 27-28, 2013 at the Jumeirah Beach Hotel, will address geomedicine in a keynote speech by Bill Davenhall.



Davenhall served as the Global Health and Human Services Solutions Manager at ESRI – the largest geographic information system (GIS) software developer in the world.



Davenhall will describe his work in the field of geomedicine – the intersection of public health knowledge with personal medicine through the use of geography. Global health begins at home. The obligation of nations to help citizens have a safe, healthy passage through life is neither a small nor simple matter – not one taken lightly by the health authorities of the UAE. Geomedicine uses modern information technology to deliver information on a patient’s potential environmental exposures into the hands of the clinician while they are in the examination room.



Davenhall will describe the uses of geographic information in disease surveillance and the growing use of GIS in today’s public and population health. GIS provides a powerful set of tools for understanding health risks to populations and for planning and evaluating interventions to improve population health.



Think of geomedicine as your personal health surveillance system – always turned on and always vigilant about sensing changes in your environments (communities, neighborhoods, households and worksites, both past and present) that might impact your health, said Davenhall. Geomedicine has the capacity to become that platform – a new medical informatics specialty devoted to bringing all the data together intelligently to actually do something to help you and your doctor keep you healthy.



Only though informed informational partnerships with our personal physicians and our public health professionals will we be better served by what is revealed through the modern geographic microscope. — SG