Health InfoScape

Health InfoScape from MIT Senseable Cities and GE aims to create new ways of understanding human health in the United States. By analyzing data from over 7.2 million anonymized electronic medical records, taken from across the country, we are seeking to uncover statical relationships between space, geography and health.

We often have a tendency to think of illness as an isolated event, but our first analysis details the numerous (sometimes unexpected) associations that exist around any given condition. This gives us new insight as to how closely connected some seemingly un-related health conditions might be. Such results force us to re-examine conventional categories of disease classification, as the boundaries between traditional disease categories are thoroughly blurred.

Initial results are a mix of the expected and the unexpected - simultaneously challenging and reaffirming our preconceptions of health pattern, within individuals and across the US. Check them out yourself using our interactive visualization page.

Now that we have a succinct picture of the human health network in the country, we will continue our investigation by delving deeper into how the environments around us factor into these results.