With the widespread deployment of near real time population health monitoring, there is increasing focus on spatial cluster detection for identifying disease outbreaks. These spatial epidemiologic methods rely on knowledge of patient location to detect unusual clusters. In hospital administrative data, patient location is collected as home address but use of this precise location raises privacy concerns. Regional locations, such as center points of zip codes, have been deployed in many existing systems. However, this practice could distort the geographic properties of the raw data and affect subsequent spatial analyses. The impact of location error due to centroid assignment on the statistical analyses underlying these systems requires study.
Objective
To investigate the impact of address precision (exact latitude and longitude versus the center points of zip codes) on spatial cluster detection.