Collaborative Geomatics for Innovation in Health Research and Policy

Inter-agency collaboration in health research, health policy development, planning, decision-making and outcomes-tracking is required to enhance governance and adaptive capacity within complex health and socio-economic systems. Collaborative information infrastructures are emerging that support such collaboration and serve to increase the resilience of health and social systems through the development of social capital, fostering innovation, the inclusion of a diversity of perspectives and redundancy in governance systems. World leading web-based collaborative structures and services are being developed in Ontario that enable government and society to foster the emergence of collaboration and governance networks. These technologies although not yet applied in the health sector have been widely applied in environment and community economic development. The authors hope that by presenting this paper containing examples in many sectors and showing some extrapolation to the health sector, the health community will see the benefits of adopting these approaches in health research, public and population health, and health policy development.