Bill Davenhall: Your health depends on where you live | Video on TED.com (video, 9 min). Bill Davenhall, an expert in geo-demographic models, suggests practical ways to improve diagnostic and preventive medicine by combining the existing data on disease rates and environmental hazards by geographic area and our own location data into the electronic health records.
During the past decades, epidemiologists collected vast amount of data on disease prevalence depending on where people live, and EPA collected detailed data on environmental hazards. These data can be easily combined. Davenhall suggests in this TED talk and in this interview to link the publicly available data to the patients' place histories (which can be made very precise using cell phone data), and store the disease rate/hazard/location data as part of the health records. This can help people make future decisions on where to live to minimize certain risks, and what to screen for during medical checkups.
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