Pandemic

To manage health emergencies, you need spatial information and the tools to use it. You need a GIS in order to answer:

. Where is disease occurring (in birds, animals, mosquitoes, and humans)?
. Where are the people with special needs (elderly, poor, isolated)?
. Where are the casualties?
. Where are the available treatment facilities, emergency resources?
. Where is damage to the infrastructure (road, facility damage)?

All these "where" questions need to be answered in order to deal with "why" and "how".

Most importantly, the GIS makes the data visible - enabling you to see the situation, the effects of your actions, and the progress over time.
You can use GIS to support a number of activities in both preparation and response. For example:. Early disease detection - cluster detection and analysis over space / time.

. Vaccine prioritization and logistics-locating vaccination sites, and distributing vaccine.
. Animal disease surveillance - tracking the disease, prioritizing culls / eradication, communications with affected people.
. Managing medical surge capacity-ensuring that the locations and capabilities of local healthcare facilities are adequate to meet the need.
. Routing of emergency services and personnel.

Specifically, GIS in important.

In Outbreak Management: ESRI's GIS software enables you to see the complex relationships between cases, contacts, animals, and objects in the environment in both time and space. This helps identify disease sources, and best implement countermeasure and response strategies like prophylaxis, quarantine, and sheltering in place.

In Risk Analysis/Modeling: Use our model building tools and statistical functions to analyze and predict disease transmission geographically. In addition, ESRI Canada resells critical demographic and lifestyle data that can inform risk assessment models.

For more GIS in Health information please visit: www.esricanada.com/health