|
|
|
|
Overview of GIS for Health OrganisationsThe tremendous potential of GIS (Geographical Information Systems) to benefit the healthcare industry is just now beginning to be realised. Used to their optimum level, as tools for analysis and decision making, GIS are indeed a new information management vehicle with rich potential for all healthcare professionals. Both public and private sectors are developing innovative ways to harness the data integration and spatial analysis and visualisation power of GIS. The types of companies and organisations adopting GIS span the healthcare spectrum — from public health departments and public health policy and research organisations to hospitals, medical centres, and health insurance organisations. Epidemiology, the most familiar type of geographic study in medicine, maps the progress of diseases, famines, toxic spills, and other health disasters. But another type of study, healthcare facilities surveys, is becoming increasingly important as competition for business increases and as governments strive to maximise the potential of available resources and funds. These surveys determine how many of a specific type of facility currently exist in an area, find the best locations for new ones, and determine how many to open. In the larger medical community, hospital administrators, pharmaceutical companies, managed care providers, and long-term care providers are just starting to use GIS. For these people, GIS offers enormous potential for improving their services by organising, using, and distributing spatial information. GIS for Public Health OrganisationsThe Centres for Disease Control (CDC, US), the world's premier disease-tracking organisation, has used GIS for at least a decade to study how disease spreads from place to place and to study how toxic substances affect people's health. The Dartmouth Medical School's CD-ROM (US) uses GIS technology to show how the amount and type of healthcare services Americans receive depend greatly on where they live — on both the capacity of the healthcare system in their area and on the methods practised by local doctors. Differences in how often hospitals are used, variations in how care of the terminally ill is delivered, and patterns of elective surgery raise important questions about the consequences and value of healthcare. The work of these health GIS pioneers has encouraged a growing number of state and local agencies to publish their health statistics, using GIS to provide access to that data on the Internet or on intranets.
GIS in Environmental Health SciencesUnderstanding the complex spatio-temporal relationships between environmental pollution and disease and identifying exposures to environmental hazards in high-risk populations are essential elements of an effective environmental and public health management program. Geographic information systems provide cost-effective tools for evaluating interventions and policies potentially affecting health outcomes. GIS analysis or display of environmental health data is also helpful in explaining disease patterns in terms of relationships with social, institutional, technological, and natural environments. Tim (1995) describes a real-world example application involving development and implementation of a prototype system called EMPHASIS (EnvironMental and Public Health datA analySIs System) to facilitate management, analysis, display, and presentation of environmental, socio-demographic, and health outcome data in Iowa (US). Tim concluded that GIS can significantly add value to environmental and public health data in areas such as exploratory data analysis, hypotheses generation, confirmatory data analysis, and decision-making. The widespread adoption of GIS in these areas, however, is impeded by issues such as inconsistent spatial scales of the data, data quality and currency, lack of appropriate statistical functions for data analysis and interpretation, and data security and confidentiality. GIS for Health PlannersHealth planners use GIS to assess how well patients are served by doctors and staff at any individual site, and whether they had to drive too far to get there. Knowing which services different populations typically need, and how far away the services are, health planners can use GIS to anticipate demand for any particular service. Recently, health planners have used GIS to evaluate marketing programs, make siting decisions (choosing suitable locations for new facilities), and figure out how best to allocate health services. The maps they create may help them see, for example, where there is room for a new facility. More and more consumers are turning to the Internet to find a hospital, a specialist, a nursing home, a 24-hour pharmacy, a mental health therapist, a chiropractor, or any other provider or service, but the same maps available on the Web can help prospective patients find the closest centre. More and more Internet sites are being engineered with GIS to provide accurate and timely information that can be found by just pointing and clicking on locations on a map.
GIS for Business ManagersHealth managers use GIS to evaluate prospective sites for hospital or outpatient clinics. They use it to tell sales teams which physicians are most likely to try a new drug or service (and provide a driving map to their offices), or send health services to people's homes by the most efficient routes. Armed with a client's data and some data of their own, the marketing and planning consultants can determine the exact mix of products and services that best meet that client's needs. They can also determine whether their client is spending too much or too little for their health care, and whether they are focusing their preventive efforts in the right areas.
GIS for Large Health OrganisationsEven in a relatively small community hospital, there may be upward of 40 separate applications that make up the organisation's information system. Most hospitals and managed care organisations recognise the value of GIS with their planning and marketing operations, and practically every health organisation has applications such as patient registration. The newest trend is hospitals working to integrate all their various systems. It is not uncommon to have many different brands of software running the various departments' systems and more than one hardware platform. Integrating all these systems means easier access to the data, making it easier for different departments to cooperate. Programs like ArcView GIS make it easy to integrate data from a variety of sources and work with the data geographically, which allows hospitals to get more from their data by using it in new ways. GIS for Insurance CompaniesInsurance companies' involvement in the medical world goes much farther than just paying the bills. They use GIS to make sure their members are within reasonable distances of the services they need. Many large health insurance companies have developed enormous data warehouses containing demographic data, as well as geographic attributes of specific diseases, interventions, and treatments. Knowing the demographics of an area, which health problems are prevalent there, and how they can be treated successfully, may help managed care organisations like Kaiser Permanente (US) decide how much money they will need to spend to run a centre successfully and where to build new facilities.
And Practically Everyone Else Uses GISPharmaceutical companies are finding that GIS helps them target the physicians most likely to use their product. And they can make more balanced sales territories and more efficient routes as well with the use of GIS. Building contractors use GIS to help health care companies decide where to locate new clinics and decide how big those facilities need to be to serve everyone well. Manufacturers of medical equipment use GIS to find out which diseases and conditions are most common in an area so they know which of their products to market there.
The Future of GIS in Health
With more than 230 infectious diseases distributed throughout 200 countries, it is becoming increasingly difficult for researchers to accurately monitor their spread. The patterns of these diseases, some of them new, some re-emerging, some ongoing, and others disappearing, change from area to area and season to season. By the time accurate research can be completed, the results are often outdated. With GIS, researchers will be able to publish this data immediately. The continual advance of Internet technology makes it the chosen medium for publishing and distributing GIS data. A large part of the power of GIS is the ability to share results in an easy-to-understand, visual medium. The outlook for GIS in the health disciplines appears unlimited. Tomorrow's applications of GIS in the healthcare industry go beyond managing patient data or analysing market information. Increasing security, finding ways to release up-to-the-minute information, and providing access to a wider variety of information on the Internet are just a few of the ways GIS will change healthcare. Reference:
|
|
Health Geomatics Back to
Health Geomatics Homepage
|
