GIS methods for health and environmental monitoring and assessment

Very often, health and environmental studies are based on the identification of correlations between population exposure to environmental agents and their effects on population health. Time and space are among the principal variables for this kind of analysis. The latter generates a significant increase in complexity of the study. Spatial analysis requires very different methods and skills, such as those on Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and on geostatistics. In this work we describe the models of geographic data (GIS data models) implemented in the framework of several health studies done recently. As an example, we describe the GIS data model generated for the city of Modena. We highlight the potentiality of GIS for health and environmental monitoring and assessment, by describing the GIS data models contents, the elaboration levels and the principal studies for which it has been used so far.