The Dynamic Health Atlas

The Dynamic Health Altas is a health informatics-based research project. It is a web application which we have developed to display point or areal data in space and time. This enables visualisation of the health landscape of a population as it changes over time. For example, such visualisations could be of particular interest to healthcare managers wishing to implement or monitor interventions at a population level. We have made this software open source so that it can be applied to wide range of data. Initially this project used the Salford NHS records to create a health atlas to show the prevalence of chronic kidney disease in Salford. It dynamically displayed the past and present health landscape for this disease in each sub-region of Salford.

The Dynamic Health Altas is now being applied to:

• Hazardous Prescribing in Salford: The Salford Medication Safety Dashboard (SMASH) is a web application which allows NHS GPs, pharmacists and healthcare managers to view patients who may be at risk due to hazardous prescribing. The Dynamic Health Atlas will be used to visualise (map) the prevalence of hazard prescribing at NHS GP surgeries across Salford (UK) and track how it evolves through time.
• Dengue in Sri Lanka: The Dynamic Health Atlas is being used to visualise the prevalence of Dengue cases in each district from 2011 to the present day. This work is currently being extended to predict the prevalence of Dengue in each district for several months into the future.

This project is funded by the Medical Research Council and is a collaboration with Niels Peek of Manchester University.