Health: GIS aids in planning and resource allocation
The healthcare industry is using GIS to help improve the health of the population. This means that services can be tailored and targeted to community needs and the outcome can be monitored - find out how below:
Better commissioning decisions
Designing better local healthcare services means gaining a better understanding of the community.
Geographic Information Systems are the perfect tool for understanding the local area and uncovering complex cause and effect relationships that influence local health commissioning. It then goes further and aids in the planning, execution, management and review process.
To understand the dynamic of the health economy, commissioners need to be able to understand the national and local picture. GIS can quickly zoom to a national, regional, community, practice, post code or custom level. GIS can overlay and analyse multiple complex datasets to identify underlying issues and gaps in supply and demand. This diagram shows supply and demand gap analysis for GP surgeries.
Getting a holistic view of information such as this can be extremely challenging because information is often buried within, and distributed across, a number of public health and government organisations. GIS brings this information together. With cloud or server GIS it is easy to share and overlay data from multiple departments in order to create a single strategic overview.
Moreover, maps are an ideal medium to communicate health issues at a community level in order to engage individuals and to help stimulate behavioural change.