CHLA Anesthesiologist and AccuWeather are using environmental data to transform children’s healthcare
Pediatric anesthesiologist Jonathan M Tan, MD, MPH, MBI, FASA, noticed a link between where his patients lived and how they were more likely to be diagnosed with respiratory diseases like asthma.
He also realized that some patients without a respiratory disease would sometimes be at higher risk for respiratory complications when receiving anesthesia.
Dr. Tan realized that health professionals would be better able to care for their patients if they had access to information on each patient’s home environment and air quality in their area.
At CHLA, Dr. Tan built a team consisting of PhD candidate Andrew Kampfschulte and geospatial analyst Alicia Adiwidjaja. Plume Labs was eventually acquired by AccuWeather. Collaborating with a larger team of experts, particularly Tyler Knowlton, Director of Communications, Communities, and Partnerships and leader of the Climate Impact Program at AccuWeather, has enabled Dr. Tan and his team at CHLA to accelerate their work.
“We’re now accessing a wide array of weather and climate data from AccuWeather,” Dr. Tan says. “This includes temperature, precipitation, humidity, ultraviolet exposure, and air quality, which is broken down into measurements of particulate matter in the air.”
“Our unique partnership with AccuWeather enables us to link their weather and climate data to our patients’ home locations in a HIPAA-compliant manner to pinpoint our patients’ exposures and their health status,” Dr. Tan says. “Then we combine all this information across our entire health system population. This allows us to create models of risk, as well as eye-opening maps showing the environments in which our patients are living.”
Dr. Tan and his team have linked weather and climate data for over 300,000 patients seen at CHLA over the last 5 years, building a detailed understanding of each patient’s environmental exposures. The team has developed a 3D map that allows someone to move through the Southern California region and track the air quality in each area.
The data revealed that more than half of CHLA’s patients live in areas with air quality that is above the World Health Organization’s recommended limit. And in terms of environmental exposure disparities across CHLA, some children experience 2-4 times more exposure to poor air quality than others.
