Geo-medicine new frontier in medical informatics

Health IT specialists will soon want to know more about a field called geo-medicine, which combines geographic information system (GIS) software with clinical databases to provide insights that might improve individual and population health. While most of the activity is still confined to academic research, GIS firms have begun to explore its commercial potential as well. A GIS application allows users to plug data into electronic maps to find out where particular things are, measure the quantity or density of those things in certain geographical areas, or find out what's inside a particular area or what's nearby.