posted on 2020-05-19, 11:23authored byFB Piel, B Parkes, P Hambly, A Roca-Barceló, M McCallion, G Leonardi, H Strosnider, F Yip, P Elliott, AL Hansell
The Rapid Inquiry Facility 4.0 (RIF) is a new user-friendly and open-access tool, developed by the UK Small Area Health Statistics Unit (SAHSU), to facilitate environment public health tracking (EPHT) or surveillance (EPHS). The RIF is designed to help public health professionals and academics to rapidly perform exploratory investigations of health and environmental data at the small-area level (e.g. postcode or detailed census areas) in order to identify unusual signals, such as disease clusters and potential environmental hazards, whether localized (e.g. industrial site) or widespread (e.g. air and noise pollution). The RIF allows the use of advanced disease mapping methods, including Bayesian small-area smoothing and complex risk analysis functionalities, while accounting for confounders. The RIF could be particularly useful to monitor spatio-temporal trends in mortality and morbidity associated with cardiovascular diseases, cancers, diabetes and chronic lung diseases, or to conduct local or national studies on air pollution, flooding, low-magnetic fields or nuclear power plants.
Funding
The UK Small Area Health Statistics Unit (SAHSU) is part of the MRC-PHE Centre for Environment and Health, which is supported by the Medical Research Council (MR/L01341X/1) and Public Health England (PHE). We acknowledge support from the NIHR Health Protection Research Unit in Health Impact of Environmental Hazards (HPRU-2012–10141). Part of this study was supported by a Wellcome Trust Seed Award in Science (204535/Z/16/Z) awarded to F.B.P. Funding from the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) as part of the US Environment and Health Public Tracking Program (http://www.cdc.gov/nceh/tracking) was also received.
History
Citation
International Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 49, Issue Supplement_1, April 2020, Pages i38–i48, https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyz094
Version
VoR (Version of Record)
Published in
International journal of epidemiology
Volume
49
Issue
1
Pagination
i38 - i48
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP) for International Epidemiological Association.
The RIF 4.0 has been developed as open source software under the GNU Lesser General Public License. Detailed instructions about its source code, build and installation process are freely available on GitHub at (https://smallareahealthstatisticsunit.github.io/rapidInquiryFacility/).