Improving Healthcare Information System Using Geographic Information System

Abstract

Employing electronic tools and new methods is a necessity due to the large volume of data and their applications in urban and regional plans on the one hand, as well as dynamic nature of data in urban systems, on the other hand. Healthcare service is, particularly, one of the most important urban applications which concerns numerous population, and covers a vast area of urban space. It faces many problems like lack of sufficient health facilities according to the community needs and inappropriate distribution of demanded centers. This study aims to evaluate the spatial distribution of hospitals and healthcare centers with the facilities they provide in the city of Pune, India. The other aim is to model the shortest access path to health facilities of Pune city and the closest facility from patient’s location using network analysis tool by employing Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology. The results showed that there are 233 healthcare facilities in the study area; out of which 94 of them are government while 139 are private. In addition, the findings from this study demonstrated that the GIS is one of the most important decision support tools that help in identification of the shortest path to the nearest healthcare center in emergency situations. GIS technology not only can profit patients, but it also can manipulate similar situations in other organizations such as the police department in order to regulate the crime as well as for fire brigade in case of fire emergencies.

Keywords: GIS, healthcare facility, network analysis, shortest path, closest facility

Cite this Article
Matin Alinejad. Improving Healthcare Information System Using Geographic Information System. Journal of Remote Sensing & GIS. 2018; 9(3): 8-15p.