Health and Human Services

Health GIS 101: The Easy Button

Don’t you wish making and using maps was easy? If you read my first Health GIS 101 blog, Introducing the Geographic Approach, you might have been inspired to add mapping to your repertoire. Or perhaps you already knew of GIS but hesitated to dive in, concerned about a steep learning curve. If so, you’re in the right place. This blog is your “easy button” for GIS—six quick and accessible ways to bring maps and spatial analysis into your health workflows with little or no prior GIS experience.

1. Esri Maps for Public Policy

Esri Maps for Public Policy, part of the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World, offers curated, ready-to-use maps that require no GIS expertise. These maps allow you to explore data on topics like health outcomes, social determinants, and policy impacts. Since they come with validated, well-documented datasets, you can be confident in the quality and credibility of the data you’re using.

Even better, you can embed these maps into your reports, presentations, or websites with no licensing required. For example, imagine using Esri Maps for Public Policy to answer questions like, “What are air quality patterns in the U.S. over time? Or “Where are people more likely to die from injuries?”—highlighting areas where stricter pollution guidelines or enhanced pedestrian safety measures could make a significant difference. Policy maps could be exactly what you need in your data-informed efforts to identify the best opportunities to intervene.

On the Esri Maps for Public Policy Site, you can explore questions like, “What are public health concerns in my community?” Add your locality of interest and get results like the locations of all uninsured people, uninsured youth, or healthy food access. If you want to save the information, you can simply email the entire collection to yourself and your collaborators.

2. Esri Maps for Microsoft

If you’re familiar with Microsoft Excel (and who in the health sector isn’t?), you already have a head start! Esri integrates GIS capabilities directly into Excel, reducing the learning curve by meeting you in a familiar environment. With a GIS ribbon and just a few clicks, you can map your data and analyze location-based trends—without ever leaving Excel.

For example, a public health department could use ArcGIS for Excel to map disease incidence rates across ZIP Codes. This can help visualize where chronic diseases or infections are clustering, empowering teams to prioritize resource allocation where it’s needed most. Beyond Excel, Esri integrates with tools like PowerBI and is built directly into the spatial capabilities’ library of Microsoft Fabric, giving you even more opportunities to apply spatial insights.

Geocoding is foundational to making and using maps. Within Excel, not only can you get longitude and latitude (XY) coordinates from your addresses with the ARCGIS.GETCOORDINATES function, but you can also do the opposite – convert your XY information into street addresses using the ARCGIS.GETADDRESS function.
This example, we’ve downloaded data from the CDC’s Places website. This data is also openly available in the ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World. In just a few clicks, we can join the crude prevalence rate of coronary heart disease by ZIP Code for the State of California to a geographic boundary file accessible directly from ArcGIS for Excel. With a few more clicks, we can symbolize the data and explore additional information in popups.
Calculating travel distance and travel time are key factors when looking to understand access to health care, public health programs, or community amenities. In Excel, it’s easy to use the ARCGIS.FINDROUTE function to calculate these parameters and find solutions to help underserved areas.
Every location has a context and that context is critical for deriving meaning from spatial data. You may want to know more about the population of an area or the environmental conditions of a place. Adding this kind of data to your locations is called geo-enrichment. You can use the ARCGIS.ENRICHBYGEOGRAPHY function to add new columns of contextual data to your Excel worksheet in just a few seconds.

3. ArcGIS Online

ArcGIS Online is a cloud-based mapping platform that makes spatial analysis accessible to everyone. It allows you to upload your data, use shared resources from other users, and/or leverage free, open and validated datasets from the Living Atlas of the World.

One could use ArcGIS Online, for example, to visualize data that combines population information with mental health providers to indicate the level of access to mental health services by U.S. County and determine how many additional mental health providers are needed.

Going into your ArcGIS Online (AGOL) organization, you can explore your existing maps and applications. Then you can create a new map. In this case, data were drawn from the SAMHSA’s survey on mental health providers and treatment facilities. Once you bring your data into AGOL, you can do things like calculate a 30-minute service area around each provider. Because the ArcGIS platform is interoperable, you could pull your service area map into a dashboard (the dashboarding app is accessible through AGOL), adding additional data and functionality to support your decision-making needs.

4. ArcGIS Solutions

ArcGIS Solutions are a series of industry-specific configurations of ArcGIS to solve common challenges. These solutions come ready-to-use, with workflows tailored to address specific needs, making them perfect for health professionals looking to get started quickly.

Health organizations can deploy a solution to respond to an outbreak. For example, during flu season, a public health department could use the Immunization Outreach solution to inventory vaccine providers, communicate vaccination coverage, and promote available resources. ArcGIS Solutions are easy to configure and can be further customized to match your organization’s needs.

Deploy solutions effortlessly. From the App Launcher, locate the Solutions icon. Health and Human Services solutions are grouped together for easy access. Select the solution of interest. In this case, the Homeless Point-In-Time Count solution is chosen. Explore its capabilities, like enlisting community volunteers to conduct point-in-time counts and providing insights about the extent of homelessness in a community. Then, with just one click, you can deploy the solution and get working immediately.

5. ArcGIS Instant Apps

Instant Apps allow you to turn data into interactive, shareable maps in just a few clicks—no coding required. With a collection of prebuilt templates, accessible directly from ArcGIS Online, you can create applications to showcase your data and engage audiences in minutes whether it be the public or specific users in your organization.

For example, imagine creating an app to visualize the demographics associated with not having health insurance at a census tract level. With Instant Apps, health professionals can quickly build a map-based tool that stakeholders can use to understand those factors and take steps to expand access to health insurance coverage.

See how easy it is to create an application with beautifully configured popups. When you go to Instant Apps (in your ArcGIS Online application launcher) you can see what’s available, preview the app and then start to configure it to your own needs. This one examines the rate of uninsured by census tract and by race.

6. Business Analyst Web App

The Business Analyst Web App combines robust spatial analysis with easy-to-follow workflows, allowing health professionals to analyze demographic data, identify trends, and generate location-based insights. Built-in tools guide users through processes like site selection and market analysis.

For instance, a health network could use the app to identify ideal locations for new clinics based on population density, income levels, and existing healthcare accessibility. Business Analyst Web App also includes infographics and reports that can be easily shared with stakeholders to support data-informed decisions.

ArcGIS Business Analyst has a lot of functionality, however, it still belongs in “the easy button” category for 3 important reasons – 1) it has guided workflows (like site suitability analysis), 2) its already includes lots of data variables (like total population, average income and vehicle ownership rates), and 3) It has lots of pre-configured infographics to work with. In this example, you’re seeing a workflow to place a new clinic aimed at supporting underserved populations where the population numbers are high but income and vehicle ownership rates are low. Once an area is selected, further population information can be gleaned from interactive infographics with just a few clicks. 

So you see, it is possible to jump into GIS for health with very little effort. Think of the learning curve in this case as similar to the Pareto Principle. You can use these six methods to get 80% value from only 20% (or less) effort. As you become more familiar with GIS, you can always expand your health-focused use cases.

Your Easy Button Challenge

I challenge you to try one of the above tools to experience how simple GIS can be. Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned professional, there’s always something new to learn. And stay tuned for the next blog in this series, where I’ll discuss how GIS serves as a system of systems—connecting data, analysis, visualizations to improve health outcomes.

About the author

Este Geraghty

Dr. Este Geraghty, MD, MS, MPH, CPH, GISP, is the Chief Medical Officer at Esri where she leads strategy and messaging for the Health and Human Services sector. Dr. Geraghty has been with Esri since 2014 and has led business development and solution development in the market. During her time at Esri, Dr. Geraghty has helped organizations around the world use location intelligence to combat Zika virus, finish the fight against polio, grapple with the opioid crisis, combat homelessness, enhance health preparedness and response, inform strategic planning, optimize healthcare access, and traverse the COVID-19 pandemic while tackling inequity. Formerly the Deputy Director of the Center for Health Statistics and Informatics with the California Department of Public Health, Dr. Geraghty led the state vital records and public health informatics programs. There she engaged in statewide initiatives in meaningful use, health information exchange, open data and interoperability. While serving as an Associate Professor of Clinical Internal Medicine at the University of California at Davis she conducted research on geographic approaches to influencing health policy and advancing community development programs. In addition to her degrees in Medicine, Medical Informatics and Public Health, Dr. Geraghty is also a board-certified public health professional (CPH) and a Geographic Information Systems Professional (GISP).

Connect:

Related Content:

Next Article

Beyond the Portal: Empowering Aldridge Electric with GIS

Read this article