Work Group 11: Feasibility Study – Health

Objectives

The aims of this work package are to:

• Explore the applicability of the methods developed to a second domain, specifically that of health.
• Identify any new issues either for the statistical methods or for the database technologies that are raised by problems from the health sector.
• Develop a plan for the implementation of the methods in the health sector.

Description of work

WHO and DEPH will take the lead in undertaking a feasibility study focused on the health impacts of socio-economic factors and environmental hazards. The work will proceed in two stages.

In the first, we will define potential areas of application for OPUS methods within the health domain (e.g., the construction of life event histories, the modelling of spatio-temporal exposure to health hazards) and also identify issues of relevance to the development and exploitation of OPUS that are of particular importance to the health sector (such as data privacy). This work will draw in particular on the WHO’s unique knowledge of and access to data heath-related data sources at the national and international level.

In the second stage, we will concentrate on the specific issue of how current epidemiological methods of assessing the exposure of different socio-economic populations segments to various environmental health hazards might be improved by the integration of data on the activity patterns of different groups. Existing methods are largely based on segmentations according to residential location, yet for certain hazards much exposure takes places away from home (e.g., at the workplace or while travelling). Data on daily activity patterns and time use is therefore potentially of value in improving exposure modelling. As part of this feasibility study, we will specialise the OPUS methodology for problems of this sort and define the structure of an appropriate implementation study.