HealthLandscape Archives

Modern Solutions for Addressing Today’s Public Health Challenges

The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) aims to strengthen family physicians and the communities they care for through prevention and public health initiatives. As part of this effort, their innovation arm, HealthLandscape, develops geospatial data visualization to help the community find insights to improve health care.

Zeroing in on Community Health Demographics

Blue Raster has been working with the organization for over a decade, creating and modernizing GIS solutions. Recently, the team moved the Community Data Portal from Flash to Java Script.

Using this portal, health providers and public health officials can filter the data most important to their communities and their area of practice. The configurable tool enables users to explore demographic, education, income, and health disparities and can be configured for any geographic area. The tool can ingest datasets from sources like the U.S. Census Bureau, the Appalachian Regional Commission, the Robert Wood Johnson County Health Rankings, Centers for Medicare & Medicaid…the possibilities are endless. Users can create side-by-side maps between indicators (for example, diabetes and poverty) to visualize potential relationships. Additionally, users can overlay infrastructure data such as interstate networks or locations of health facilities and start to visualize patterns between the two. Graphs and charts are available to see the numbers behind the data and reports can be automatically run off the filters. The solution uses Esri ArcGIS API for JavaScript, Node, React, and ArcGIS Enterprise and Portal for ArcGIS.

Public Health Tool: HealthLandscape Community Data Portal

Meeting the Demands of High Risk Populations

Similarly, Blue Raster developed the Local Needs Assessment application that helps identify high-risk areas based on social determinants of health (“cold spots”) and poor health outcomes (“hot spots”). Identifying and mapping these high-risk areas allows for targeted approaches. The solution allows users to explore relationships between these two and identify outliers by creating scatter plots. In addition, users can customize this solution to examine childhood health, geographic population health, mental health and more public health indicators.

Health organizations are developing innovative ways to harness the data integration and spatial visualization power of GIS.

GIS plays a critical role in determining where and when to intervene, improving the quality of care, increasing accessibility of service, finding more cost-effective delivery modes, and preserving patient confidentiality while satisfying the needs of the research community for data accessibility. Contact us today to learn more!

Blue raster is pleased to announce the release of the newest HealthLandsape tool – the Appalachia Community Data Portal.

Created for the Appalachian region, the tool enables users to explore demographic, education, income, and health disparities for more than 400 Appalachia counties. The tool marries datasets from the the U.S. Census Bureau, the Appalachian Regional Commission, the Robert Wood Johnson County Health Rankings, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid.

Using the Appalachia Data Portal tool, users can create side-by-side maps between indicators (for example, diabetes and poverty) to visualize potential relationships. Users can also overlay infrastructure data such as interstate networks or locations of Health Facilities, and start to visualize patterns between the two. Graphs and charts are available to see the numbers behind the data.

Explore the Appalachia Data Portal, and more health information tools, at healthlandscape.org.

Blue Raster is pleased to announce the release of the new version of HealthLandscape, an interactive web-based mapping tool for healthcare providers, advocates, researchers, and policy makers. HealthLandscape Version 3, which was launched in October, enhances the power of this award-winning GIS application, which allows healthcare professionals to combine, analyze, and display health information in ways that promote understanding, improve outcomes, and reduce cost of healthcare. In July 2011, HealthLandscape and UDS Mapper took first place in the Web-Based GIS Application category at the Esri International User Conference’s User Software Applications Fair.

Blue Raster upgraded HealthLandscape from a legacy server system (ArcIMS) to ArcGIS Server and Flex API to provide users with more dynamic applications and greater functionality. Most notably, HealthLandscape’s anthology of health-related tools can now be combined, enabling the user to use them all in one mapping viewer. Users can turn tools on and off depending on their data needs and display layers from multiple tools on the map at the same time.

The new version also makes it easier for healthcare professionals and advocates to combine their own data with existing health maps and public sources of health, socio-economic and environmental information. Using the new QuickGeocodes tool, users can upload data from Excel spreadsheets to create instant health maps. They can also use the new QuickThemes tool to upload state, county or zip code-level data to create thematic maps that show how health information varies from region to region.

Visit HealthLandscape and see for yourself how it conveniently brings together and communicates critical health information and trends with compelling custom maps.

This year we launched an online data explorer tool for health care professionals and policy makers, called the Med School Mapper. The goal of this tool is to map the reach (or footprint) of medical school programs and graduates.

The Med School Mapper dramatically reduces the effort and time needed to identify communities that depend on a program’s or state’s graduates the most. It includes a footprint map showing which counties a state’s or school’s graduates are serving and how intensely. The map also shows:

if graduates are caring for underserved communities
whether graduates are practicing in rural communities
which areas of care they are focused on

This information is used by state policymakers to direct expansion funding for medical school programs. The tool was built using ArcGIS Server and Flex API. View the tool today, and see how it is capturing the impact of local and regional medical schools.

Blue Raster has partnered with HealthLandscape to design an interactive web atlas that allows health professionals, policy makers, academic researchers and planners to combine, analyze and display information in ways that promote understanding and improvement of healthcare. This gives health practitioners the tools they need to create simple, effective displays of their neighborhoods, communities, and regions. HealthLandscape allows organizations to reveal relationships through:

Distribution Mapping of point data, such as patient concentrations around clinic locations, polluted water sources, or high poverty areas
Service Area Mapping, analyzing population data against known encounter information to define underserved areas
Market Penetration Mapping, revealing the proportion of people visiting a specific site from nearby areas calculating penetration rates.

For more information regarding HealthLandscape please visit http://www.healthlandscape.org/.

Our Work

Public Health & GIS: HealthLandscape Addresses Today’s Public Health Challenges

Modern Solutions for Addressing Today’s Public Health Challenges

Zeroing in on Community Health Demographics

Meeting the Demands of High Risk Populations

Appalachia Community Data Portal

Rethinking Health Mapping with Rich Visualizations

Footprint Map of Medical School Graduates

HealthLandscape