Health & Human Services

GIS works with existing healthcare systems to accomplish important analytical and reporting tasks, from bed management to trauma analysis. Most health and human service problems facing the world today exist in a geographic context and any analysis must consider that. Understanding issues ranging from medical epidemiology to healthcare access requires a comprehensive understanding of their geography. New applications arise to leverage location all the time because it is easy and effective to represent, integrate, and access information through geography. When you do, you often find relationships and identify gaps and trends that would not be visible in a document, chart, or spreadsheet. This means better and faster decisions, less chance for error, and improved communications and understanding. GIS saves you money, time, and helps deliver quality health services. Public health Health professionals use GIS for many different applications including epidemiological and public health monitoring, tracking public health indicators, identifying disease clusters, and exploring sites of environmental risk. Outbreaks of infectious diseases such as SARS can be quickly analyzed using GIS tools. As an example a website was established in Hong Kong to track the locations of reported SARS cases and disseminate this information not only to the local population but to a global audience as well. The globalization of infectious disease makes the use of GIS critical across the healthcare system in every national health ministry. Applications of GIS for public health include: Public health surveillance     Epidemiology Public health program delivery Health service planning Emergency response (e.g. 911) Program communications

Solutions for hospitals

Healthcare facility managers use GIS to manage assets like beds and equipment; show what resources exist and where to find them; help with surge capacity planning; and identify and manage infection outbreaks. Knowing the real-time capacities of healthcare facilities during emergency events is essential.

GIS can be linked to an internal Hospital Information System (HIS). With this application, the hospital care location of every patient is linked directly to the clinical events relevant to that patient. GIS also allows hospital management to see the physical location of each patient within the healthcare environment and to more efficiently allocate resources and speed up admissions.

Applications of GIS for hospitals include:

• Enterprise implementations for accessing information from anywhere    
• Client service
• Emergency preparedness
• Hospital surge capacity planning & response
• Resource/asset management
• Site selection

Solutions for managed care

Arranging and paying for healthcare is an important activity in any health organization. GIS provides an efficient way to organize and manage a wide variety of administrative, medical, and social services to patients.

Health organizations are using GIS to help their workforce deliver higher patient service. Getting patients and workers to the right place efficiently has become a business imperative for most public health, hospital, and human service organizations.

• Scheduling and route planning   
• Location registry and tracking
• Demographic analysis