Community health centers, Latino migrants, and GIS: Exploring Salud Migrante

Background: Geographic information systems (GIS), including HealthLandscape, are crucial for health centers to assess local communities, patient distributions, and service areas. We explore whether this tool helps four community health centers better understand their Latino migrant and resident patients they serve.

Methods: We first reviewed the literature on GIS use in community clinics and on demographic and health data of Latino migrant workers in the U.S. After inviting pilot grantees to utilize HealthLandscape, we conducted needs assessments of the centers' mapping goals, encouraged them to map publicly available data pertinent to their community's health indices, and securely upload their own data. Lastly, we trained and evaluated the health centers' and migrant organizations' use of the software. The qualitative evaluations assessed its strengths and weaknesses as a GIS planning instrument that prepared the centers and organizations for a population-specific health insurance program.

Results: This project is set for completion in September 2009. In this session, we will discuss the HealthLandscape training and evaluation process, as well as highlight, through mapping use cases, the successes and limitations the grantees experienced.

Conclusions: The HealthLandscape online software offers community health centers serving Latino migrants a unique opportunity to further understand the communities and populations they serve. Understanding their service areas and penetration rates, diagnoses distributions, related costs, and surrounding community characteristics enhances clinical marketing and outreach initiatives, activities important to the implementation of Salud Migrante among participating Latino migrant organizations.