About the Massachusetts Health and Environmental Information System (MassHEIS)

Maps are a powerful tool to identify spatial disparities in health and grasp relationships between disease and environmental characteristics. Often, community environmental health concerns are first expressed in maps.

In a National Library of Medicine-supported project, Silent Spring Institute has developed a web-based, interactive mapping tool, that serves the dual goals of community access to health and environmental information about communities in Massachusetts and researcher access to underlying datasets developed in the Institute’s Cape Cod Breast Cancer and Environment Study and by state, federal, and other nonprofit sources.

Users can: (1) view pre-assembled maps for their area; (2) independently explore relationships among the factors; and (3) explore FAQs and links to outside contextual information for interpreting the maps. For example, a pre-assembled asthma map displays the geographic distributions of asthma hospitalizations, transportation corridors, and air quality measures and provides links to asthma studies from PubMed, ATSDR information on environmental triggers, and the Environmental Defense Scorecard ranking of the community’s pollution levels.

Technical users may download or interactively access the geographic information systems (GIS) data and metadata via ArcIMS web services. One of the first publicly available sites of its kind, the tool represents an important step in increasing access to essential health and environmental information, as well as sharing the Institute’s own ground breaking research. For instructions on how to get started with the MassHEIS system, please click here.