Q&A with Bill Davenhall on Medical Place History, TEDMED, and the Importance of a Story Well Told

A little more than a year ago, ESRI’s Bill Davenhall delivered a thought-provoking talk at TEDMED about the importance of including a “place history”—a record of the places where a person has lived (and the nearby environmental risks)—as part of that person’s medical history. (Watch a video of Davenhall’s talk here.)

ESRI, based in Redlands, CA, is the world’s largest developer of geographic information system (GIS) software, and at its annual conference in July, ESRI unveiled its first GIS mobile mapping app for the iPhone and iPad, which is free. ESRI also highlighted related “crowdsourcing” initiatives that extend its mapping technology beyond its usual Windows-based market.

Last week, ESRI added a new app to the Apple iStore and to its Web-based offerings that begins to fulfill the vision that Davenhall outlined at the 2009 TEDMED conference in San Diego. (ESRI used its proprietary ArcGIS technology to develop the mapping API for mobile devices running Apple’s operating system.)

The app, which also is available on ESRI’s website, is pretty simple to use. You can enter the address, zip code, or even just a city name for every place you’ve lived, and the system responds with information about public health and environmental hazards for each location. The app draws upon publicly available data concerning the incidence of heart attacks (per 100,000 Medicare enrollees) from the Dartmouth Atlas Project, and lists of chemicals within three miles, according to data drawn from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxics Release Inventory and the National Institutes of Health’s known chemical database. ESRI spokesman Bob Ruschman says, “Future versions will include additional databases for water quality, lead contamination, cancer, mortality, and poverty.”

Bill Davenhall
Bill Davenhall

As ESRI’s global marketing manager for health and human services, Davenhall contends that a patient’s place history is just as important in assessing human health risks as genetics and lifestyle. In a medical evaluation, Davenhall says physicians will ask a lot of questions about a patient’s medical history: Any allergies? Taking any medications? How about illicit drugs? Drink alcohol? Smoke tobacco? Any previous hospitalizations? Davenhall says doctors never

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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.