Cleansing and Geocoding Spatial Data for an Academic Medical Center

The need for quality data to quickly identify patient population profiles and distributions is becoming even more significant in the current era of heightened public health surveillance initiatives. The authors describe an iterative technique, developed as part of a data warehouse (DW) implementation project at the Ohio State University Medical Center (OSUMC), to validate and cleanse city, state and zip code combinations of patient addresses. In addition, by attaching zip code centered latitude and longitude coordinates and other geographic information to the cleansed record, process known as ‘geocoding’, allows spatial analysis by disease, gender and age of the patients.