Uses for GIS in Health Care

There is a lot of talk about Big Data and what it means. Geographic Information Systems is a perfect platform for taking advantage of this data. A great deal of mapping data is public information, and can be accessed freely. So what are some of the ways we are using this data, and what opportunities does it create?

Mapping Health Issues

In 1854, John Snow used mapping to analyze a cholera outbreak in London, so this application is not new, but we have much more advanced tools. More recently, GIS was used to help stem the Ebola outbreak..

Mapping software can also be used to find clusters of events near each other, and create a map using that data. (This is vital in the health care industry)

Instances of specific diseases or health issues are often clustered around a housing development or neighborhood. GIS mapping can reveal a pattern over a particular waterway, which can then be deduced as being contaminated.

Mapping Potential Causes for Disease

Using correlations between data sets, researchers can determine if certain environmental or other factors might potentially be causes of disease. Researchers could use GIS to map historical pesticide use to determine if it was a potential cause for cancer.

Mapping Patient Environmental History

As valuable as residential data is, physicians and other health care providers often do not gather it, even when it is available. Throughout the world, health is very dependent on location, however, the practice of gathering residential history has yet to be adopted by most physicians.

Although diagnosis is related to genetics, lifestyle, and environment, the last item is often neglected. The forms you fill out at your doctor seldom ask for environmental history. GIS mapping can be used to correlate public health information with your environmental history, but is so far only available on iOS.

While Geomedicine is a growing field, the amount of data that needs to be gathered and stored for a truly accurate picture is enormous. As more methods emerge for handling big data, it is hoped that medical records will include geocoded data on a regular basis.

Mapping for Child Welfare

Social work and mapping hasn’t really been happening, and it is important to figure out how to use GIS tools to help with child welfare. Organizations could map foster children in relation to schools, or how far families live from the homes where their children have been placed?

Mapping the Homeless

Homelessness is a large public health and social issue, and efforts from mapping the density of homelessness by area, to more focused mapping efforts in large cities are being done to better allocate resources and focus on solutions.  

A useful method would be to track the chronically homeless, and inform charitable organizations, volunteers and resource managers so that they can better assist the members of their community.