GIS for All Health Organizations Kristen Kurland, Teaching Professor, H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management / School of Architecture
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are computerized systems designed for the storage, retrieval, and analysis of geographically referenced data. In other words, GIS maps all types of physical, biological, cultural, demographic, and economic information.
Although the roots of GIS in cartography go back hundreds of years, GIS as we know it today began in the 1950s and 1960s and was used primarily in the government sector.
Why are so many health organizations now seeing the benefits of managing their organizations using GIS? The answer is quite simple: managing health care costs by efficiently meeting health care needs with available resources is an activity that is central to every health organization.
GIS provides an effective way to visualize, organize, and manage a wide variety of information including administrative and medical data, social services, and patient information. Public health agencies are using GIS to map health events, identify disease clusters, investigate environmental health problems, and understand the spread of communicable and infectious disease. GIS is also a powerful tool to enhance the way health agencies do business because consumer access to the health care is in part controlled by geographic location.
This session will inform and educate people from a variety of health organizations (including public health, health care, managed care, and academic research) about the value of GIS to the entire organization.
Geoprocessing is an essential aspect of GIS that provides the ability to analyze and process geographic data. ModelBuilder provides a graphical modeling framework for designing and implementing geoprocessing models that can include system tools, scripts, models, and data.
This seminar discusses how ModelBuilder can be used to create advanced procedures and workflows and will specifically address how to create, edit, and run models; how to make models more dynamic by exposing model parameters; and how to validate, repair, and document models to share with others. It is intended for ArcGIS Desktop users who want to make their geoprocessing tasks more streamlined and efficient with ModelBuilder.
Participants should be familiar with ArcGIS Desktop and have a basic understanding of the ArcGIS geoprocessing framework.
Epidemiologists have been using GIS technology for more than a decade. Traditional GIS analysis allows health organizations to track and better understand epidemic progressions, and to produce maps showing overall outbreak patterns. This workshop will present new spatial statistical methods available in ArcGIS 9 that extend these traditional types of analyses to also include:
Identifying, analyzing, and responding to incident hot spots and incident cold spots
Where is the disease outbreak concentrated?
How can scarce resources (police, fire, medical response teams) be most effectively deployed?
What factors contribute to higher than expected disease rates?
Summarize spatial pattern over time
Is the problem remaining geographically fixed or is it spreading rapidly in to nearby regions?
Are containment and other response efforts effective?
Are the processes promoting disease consistent across the study area?
Identify anomalous spatial patterns
Where are we seeing unexpected increases/peaks (in pharmaceutical purchases or illness)?
Most of the approaches described in this workshop are simple and straightforward; they can easily be integrated into existing ArcGIS analytical strategies. This workshop will be most beneficial to people with prior experience using ArcGIS. No prior statistical knowledge is required.
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