Evaluating the Role of Citizen Science in Improving Spatial Data Quality for Health Planning in the USA

Abstract

Spatial data can be instrumental in health planning in the sense in which it helps policymakers to recognize inequalities, distribute resources, and create interventions according to geographic trends in disease and access to services. Nevertheless, standard sources of spatial data in the United States namely government health surveys, administrative records, and satellite data are frequently associated with issues of timeliness, completeness and local accuracy. Citizen science has also become a complementary method over recent years, where the public is involved in the data collection process, mapping, and validation that have the potential to add more information to the spatial resolution and contextual richness of health-related data. This paper analyzes the contribution of citizen science to the quality of spatial data on health planning in the USA. It analyzes the most important platforms of citizen science, including OpenStreetMap and HealthMap, and contrasts their outputs with authoritative datasets to evaluate the difference in their completeness, location accuracy, and topicality. The research utilizes both spatial data analysis and the interviews of stakeholders to determine the ways in which citizen-generated data can provide essential information on missing links in the knowledge of environmental exposures, most accessible health services, and health risks at a community level. The results underscore the possibility of the participatory data ecosystems to enhance the power of the intelligence of the population, the equity of data, and the evidence-based decision-making in various communities.