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Geomatics: An Enabling Technology in Health and Healthcare
To prove this, ESRI
(Environmental Systems Research Institute, Inc., US), a leading GIS software
company, has prepared a Flash animation that follows the daily routine of an
ordinary person, showing how Geographic Information Systems (GIS), a central
tool in geomatics, are helping her transparently in ways that she (and indeed
many of us) might have never suspected.
MapQuest is another very simple application of geomatics that you can try yourself. Using MapQuest, a Web GIS application, you can instantly get the route (driving directions) between any two Postal Codes in the UK and much more, as shown in the screenshot below (Driving Directions from N17 8HD, where this author lives, to EC1V 0HB, where City University is located).
Imagine using an application similar to MapQuest to help Ambulance cars reach their destinations via the fastest/shortest routes. How useful could it be? HealthQuery® is a non-commercial collection of Web-based tools that uses technology from ESRI and other suppliers to assist California residents (in the USA) and their health organisations in making more informed decisions regarding personal health and community health. Their Health Facility Finder tool (shown in the screenshot below) allows users to locate the hospitals, clinics and emergency rooms that are nearest to them. HealthQuery® also has plans to develop other tools to model and simulate the supply and demand for healthcare services into the future. The envisaged tools will also allow the user to compare the current supply and demand for these services. The Global Positioning System (GPS), another technology from the geomatics toolbox, can also save lives. Many police, fire, and emergency medical service units are using GPS receivers to determine (track) the police car, fire truck, or ambulance nearest to an emergency, enabling the quickest possible response in life-or-death situations. Automobile manufacturers are offering moving-map displays guided by GPS receivers as an option on new vehicles. The displays can be removed and taken into a home to plan a trip. GPS-equipped vehicles exist that give directions to drivers on display screens and through synthesised voice instructions. Beyond Simple Cartography and RoutingGeomatics can provide a lot more than just simple mapping (cartography) and routing. In the health sector, geomatics tools allow for more superior spatio-temporal modelling, simulation and analysis of health, disease and healthcare systems to be done. Geomatics can be thus considered another very useful and unique form of decision support in this vital sector. Most of the Medical Geography and Epidemiology applications and problems that we have discussed in the previous two lectures (1.1 and 1.2) are indeed amenable to the different geomatics solutions with excellent outcomes. (See also: GIS in Health and Healthcare and Spatial Analysis and GIS Functions.) In the next two parts of this series of lectures on Health Geomatics, we will define Geomatics in a more formal way and discuss the fundamentals of GIS and related technologies like Remote Sensing and GPS. The last part of this course presents some case studies of real-life applications from the health sector in which geomatics technologies have been used.
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Health Geomatics Back to
Health Geomatics Homepage
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During the past thirty years, a powerful technology has quietly changed the way people view and live in their neighbourhoods, towns, and cities. This technology (and scientific discipline) is
Geomatics, and as is the case with many other technologies, many people
are using it and are positively affected by it in their daily lives without knowing
anything about it.
