Geospatial Processing System for Social and Environmental Health Research

我们现在和未来的健康受到社会和自然环境的强烈影响。收入、住房和环境暴露方面的变化与健康不平等有关，但这些变化可能是可变的，可以通过循证干预措施加以预防。因此，确定和了解影响国民健康的社会和环境因素对于帮助减少健康不平等至关重要。这需要对英国每个居民的环境暴露和社会因素进行高度精确的建模，并通过居住地址将这些因素与患者记录、队列参与者和行政卫生系统联系起来。为了实现这一点，需要最先进的能力和能力来安全存储、处理、分析和共享大量数据，但目前帝国理工学院还没有。我们建议在伦敦帝国理工学院建立一个社会和环境健康研究地理空间处理系统（GeoPS），这是一个独立的、高性能的解决方案，用于模拟地址级的社会和环境数据，并将这些数据与个人健康记录安全地链接起来。GeoPS将提供存储容量、内存和处理能力，使用新颖的方法和数据，包括来自卫星和谷歌街景图像的数据，对英国每个地址的空气污染、噪音、住房质量和绿色空间进行建模。这样的模型已经存在，或者目前正在帝国理工学院的MRC环境与健康中心开发中，但是缺乏将这些模型扩大到国家层面的能力。医疗服务中心将遵守政府有关保存和安全处理个人资料的规定，以保障病人的机密性。这使我们能够将构建的暴露概况与存储在帝国学院英国小区域卫生统计单位健康数据库中的约3亿个人记录联系起来，这些记录包含来自国家统计办公室的死亡和出生信息以及来自NHD Digital的医院事件统计。联系也计划建立帝国理工学院主办的纵向人口研究。这些相互关联的数据资源将使先进的流行病学分析能够指导政策、公共卫生和服务，以改善国民健康。在内部建立这样的设备和基础设施，将使我们能够对新出现的社会和环境卫生问题采取行动，并及时向公共卫生主任、英国卫生安全局以及地方和国家政府的决策者提供流行病学证据。

Our current and future health is strongly influenced by our social and physical environment. Changes in income, housing, and environmental exposures are linked to health inequalities but are potentially changeable and preventable through evidence-based interventions. Identifying and understanding the social and environmental factors which impact on the nation's health is, therefore, essential to help reducing health inequalities. This requires highly accurate modelling of environmental exposure and social factors for each resident in the UK, and the linkage of these to patient records, cohort participants and administrative health systems, via the residential address. To enable this, state of the art capacity and capabilities to securely store, process, analyse and share large amounts of data are needed, but are currently not available at Imperial College London.We propose establishing a Geospatial Processing System for Social and Environmental Health Research (GeoPS) at Imperial College London, a stand-alone, high-performance solution to model address-level social and environmental data and securely link these to individual health records. The GeoPS will provide the storage capacity, memory, and processing power to model exposure to air pollution, noise, housing quality and greenspace for each address in the UK using novel methods and data, including from satellites and Google Street View images. Such models already exist or are currently under development at the MRC Centre for Environment and Health at Imperial College, but the capacity to scale these up to the national level is missing. The GeoPS will follow information government requirements on the save and secure handling of personal information to maintain patient confidentiality. This allows us to link the constructed exposure profiles to the ~300 million individual records that are stored in health data bases at the UK Small Area Health Statistics Unit, Imperial College, and contain information on deaths and birth from the Office for National Statistics and Hospital Episode Statistics from NHD Digital. Linkage is also planned to established Imperial College hosted longitudinal population studies.These linked data resources will enable advanced epidemiological analyses to guide policy, public health and services to improve the nation's health. Establishing such equipment and infrastructure in house, will enable us to act at pace to emerging social and environmental health issues and provide timely epidemiological evidence to Directors of Public Health, the UK Health Security Agency and policy makers in local and national governments.