The three laws of geography serve as an indispensable theoretical foundation to facilitate the analysis of a wide range of health-related issues from a geospatial perspective, such as diseases, health and social inequalities, health services, healthcare resource allocation, and health economic policies. However, biased or even misleading outcomes have been induced by traditional non-spatial health and medical analysis methods which failed to take into account those essential laws of geography. In the past decade, studies and practices of applying geospatial information technologies and spatial statistics to health economics and public health related fields have flourished. These geospatial technologies and methods have been widely used for diverse research and practical purposes such as geospatial equality analysis, geographic clustering and hotspot detection, spatial accessibility analysis, identification of regional determinants of health, and spatial interpolation and prediction. Such a wide range of geospatial-facilitated applications has contributed to the rapid development of multiple cutting-edge interdisciplinary disciplines such as spatial econometrics, health and medical geography, and spatial epidemiology. Under the current global context where big geospatial data has become a widespread tool for investigating human health and its associated factors, higher challenges are posed to geospatial health and medical methods, such as geospatial causal inference, spatiotemporal interaction modeling, coupling of individualized and regional data, mining of population movement trajectory data, the problem of scale effects in health outcomes, integration and analysis of multisource heterogeneous health data.
This Research Topic aims to intensively display some of the recently emerged and advanced geospatial information technologies and spatial health statistical methods that have been employed to tackle public health issues, especially in the fields of health services research and health economics. Our goal is to facilitate the fusion of public health and geography. For public health professionals, this research topic explores the great potential of employing geographic information science (GIScience) to facilitate a better understanding of health economic issues as well as to inform the implementation of effective health economic policies based on evidence provided by up-to-date case studies. For GIS practitioners and spatial statisticians, the research topic sheds light upon those key public health-related study areas that currently and will continue to benefit from the incorporation of geospatial analysis as well as its associated technologies and methods. As such, this research topic intends to provide a thorough picture to highlight the newest milestones achieved in such interdisciplinary domains, from methodological themes and theories to applications.
We welcome any research that falls in health services research and health economics and uses recently emerged and advanced geospatial information technologies, spatial and spatiotemporal statistical methods, as well as big geospatial data. Articles using similar geospatial approaches in spatial epidemiology, environmental health, planetary health, and social medicine are also appreciated. Potential topics to be addressed in our research topic are expected to include but not limited to,
• Applications of new techniques of Geographic Information Science (GIScience) and Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI) in health services research and public health.
• Applications of spatial econometrics, geospatial causal inference, geographically weighted regression, and Bayesian spatial or spatiotemporal statistical models in health services research and public health.
• Applications of improved spatial accessibility methods and technologies to investigate the demand and supply of health services.
• Analysis of determinants (influencing factors) of health outcome disparities considering spatial or spatiotemporal nonstationarity.
• Applications of multisource earth and environmental data based on satellite remote sensing in health economics and health policy research.
• Health services and public health research incorporating individual-level data and macro-geospatial-level data, or based on frontier geospatial theories, such as the third law of geography.
The three laws of geography serve as an indispensable theoretical foundation to facilitate the analysis of a wide range of health-related issues from a geospatial perspective, such as diseases, health and social inequalities, health services, healthcare resource allocation, and health economic policies. However, biased or even misleading outcomes have been induced by traditional non-spatial health and medical analysis methods which failed to take into account those essential laws of geography. In the past decade, studies and practices of applying geospatial information technologies and spatial statistics to health economics and public health related fields have flourished. These geospatial technologies and methods have been widely used for diverse research and practical purposes such as geospatial equality analysis, geographic clustering and hotspot detection, spatial accessibility analysis, identification of regional determinants of health, and spatial interpolation and prediction. Such a wide range of geospatial-facilitated applications has contributed to the rapid development of multiple cutting-edge interdisciplinary disciplines such as spatial econometrics, health and medical geography, and spatial epidemiology. Under the current global context where big geospatial data has become a widespread tool for investigating human health and its associated factors, higher challenges are posed to geospatial health and medical methods, such as geospatial causal inference, spatiotemporal interaction modeling, coupling of individualized and regional data, mining of population movement trajectory data, the problem of scale effects in health outcomes, integration and analysis of multisource heterogeneous health data.
This Research Topic aims to intensively display some of the recently emerged and advanced geospatial information technologies and spatial health statistical methods that have been employed to tackle public health issues, especially in the fields of health services research and health economics. Our goal is to facilitate the fusion of public health and geography. For public health professionals, this research topic explores the great potential of employing geographic information science (GIScience) to facilitate a better understanding of health economic issues as well as to inform the implementation of effective health economic policies based on evidence provided by up-to-date case studies. For GIS practitioners and spatial statisticians, the research topic sheds light upon those key public health-related study areas that currently and will continue to benefit from the incorporation of geospatial analysis as well as its associated technologies and methods. As such, this research topic intends to provide a thorough picture to highlight the newest milestones achieved in such interdisciplinary domains, from methodological themes and theories to applications.
We welcome any research that falls in health services research and health economics and uses recently emerged and advanced geospatial information technologies, spatial and spatiotemporal statistical methods, as well as big geospatial data. Articles using similar geospatial approaches in spatial epidemiology, environmental health, planetary health, and social medicine are also appreciated. Potential topics to be addressed in our research topic are expected to include but not limited to,
• Applications of new techniques of Geographic Information Science (GIScience) and Geospatial Artificial Intelligence (GeoAI) in health services research and public health.
• Applications of spatial econometrics, geospatial causal inference, geographically weighted regression, and Bayesian spatial or spatiotemporal statistical models in health services research and public health.
• Applications of improved spatial accessibility methods and technologies to investigate the demand and supply of health services.
• Analysis of determinants (influencing factors) of health outcome disparities considering spatial or spatiotemporal nonstationarity.
• Applications of multisource earth and environmental data based on satellite remote sensing in health economics and health policy research.
• Health services and public health research incorporating individual-level data and macro-geospatial-level data, or based on frontier geospatial theories, such as the third law of geography.
