GEOINFORMATICS AND HEALTH: REVIEW, CHARACTERIZATION AND ANALYSIS OF WEB-BASED GIS PLATFORMS FOR PUBLIC HEALTH SURVEILLANCE

This study aims to review Web-based GIS (Web-GIS) platforms developed globally to support public health surveillance, analyze their main operational and functional attributes, as well as suggest alternatives to improve the development and implementation of these platforms in public health surveillance field. From a literature review, 2564 relevant articles were retrieved, of which 15 were selected to identify, extract, and analyze these Web-GIS platforms, using six criteria specially designed for this purpose. Results from this study underscore a broad diversity of development conditions across the examined Web-GIS platforms, and spotlight important gaps in integrating crucial features for surveillance activities. Considering these findings, both the criteria developed to analyze Web-GIS platforms and the solutions proposed in this work to mitigate some of the identified gaps can serve as a reference point to help public health researchers and developers to better implement future tools of this kind.