Health Geography and Spatial Health Analytics

The CGA’s work in the area of health geography and spatial health analytics, spans studies of spatial access to care, telehealth use and reciprocity, environmental and neighborhood determinants of health, and methodological advances for modeling and sharing health-related spatiotemporal data. 

Projects include analyses of spatial accessibility to clinics, cross-state travel patterns for cancer care, asthma risks linked to neighborhood conditions, and cancer data downscaling using Monte Carlo simulation. 

The Center also contributes to open and reproducible workflows for health geospatial analysis, including cloud-native and visual programming approaches that support transparent, scalable research.  Here is a list of some of our publications in this area:

• Digital divides in telehealth accessibility for cancer care in the United States — 2025
• A multi-constraint Monte Carlo Simulation approach to downscaling cancer data — 2025
• Cross-State Travel for Cancer Care and Implications for Telehealth Reciprocity — 2025
• Child Opportunity Index at birth and asthma with recurrent exacerbations in the US ECHO program — 2025
• Residing in a low-income-low-food-access neighbourhood and asthma in early and middle childhood in the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) program: a multisite cohort study — 2025
• Dental Clinic Deserts in the US: Spatial Accessibility Analysis — 2024
• Health for all: Primary care facility localization in Lesotho using qualitative research and GIS — 2024
• Developing and examining the transit-based accessibility to hospitals of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia — 2023
• Using digital traces to build prospective and real-time county-level early warning systems to anticipate COVID-19 outbreaks in the United States — 2023
• Incidence rates of childhood asthma with recurrent exacerbations in the US Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) program — 2023
• Refining 2SVCA method for measuring telehealth accessibility of primary care physicians in Baton Rouge, Louisiana — 2023
• Staying Home, Tweeting Hope: Mixed Methods Study of Twitter Sentiment Geographical Index During US Stay-At-Home Orders — 2023
• Childhood Asthma Incidence, Early and Persistent Wheeze, and Neighborhood Socioeconomic Factors in the ECHO/CREW Consortium — 2022
• Spatial Variations of Village-Level Environmental Variables from Satellite Big Data and Implications for Public Health — 2022
• An examination of water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) accessibility and opportunity in urban informal settlements during the COVID-19 pandemic: Evidence from Nairobi, Kenya — 2022
• Understanding the Geography of COVID-19 Case Fatality Rates in China: A Spatial Autoregressive Probit-Log Linear Hurdle Analysis — 2022
• Human mobility and COVID-19 transmission: a systematic review and future directions — 2022
• Exploring the impact of under-reported cases on the COVID-19 spatiotemporal distributions using healthcare workers infection data — 2022
• Estimating the Burden of Child Undernutrition for Smaller Electoral Units in India — 2021
• Spatiotemporal pattern of COVID-19 spread in Brazil — 2021
• A distributed geospatial approach to describe community characteristics for multi-site studies — 2021
• Precision mapping child undernutrition for nearly 600,000 inhabited census villages in India. — 2021
• COVID-19 impact on excess deaths of various causes in the United States — 2021
• Taking the pulse of COVID-19: A spatiotemporal perspective — 2020
• Building an open resources repository for COVID-19 research — 2020
• Association of Prenatal Exposure to Population-Wide Folic Acid Fortification With Altered Cerebral Cortex Maturation in Youths — 2018
• A novel surveillance approach for disaster mental health — 2017
• Finding HIV in Hard to Reach Populations: Mobile HIV Testing and Geospatial Mapping in Umlazi Township, Durban, South Africa. — 2015
• Demographic Disparities in the Tobacco Retail Environment in Boston, Massachusetts? A Citywide Spatial Analysis. — 2014
• Distance to hospital and utilization of surgical services in Haiti: do children, delivering mothers, and patients with emergent surgical conditions experience greater geographical barriers to surgical care? — 2013
• Applying GIS Methods to Public Health Research at Harvard University — 2011