Geospatial Processing System for Social and Environmental Health Research

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.