Using GIS in Community Health Planning and Policy Development

Background: In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans rebuilt its primary care infrastructure with support from an array of federal, state and local entities. Coordinated planning was lacking, and New Orleans now faces simultaneous infrastructure excess and gaps in the years ahead. We combined utilization and claims data from safety net providers in Greater New Orleans to generate individual and macroscopic clinical service areas, define overlap and service gaps and created a web interface to inform effective safety-net planning for the years 2012-15. In the session, we will summarize the steps involved in developing this community assessment and application, as well its evaluation. Methods: Structured conversation, data exchange and ground level planning with partners and stakeholders in the Greater New Orleans Descriptive data analyses precede the creation of a New Orleans Safety Net Visualization Tool built within the HealthLandscape-UDS Mapper platform. Results: Resulting static maps reveal current safety net catchment area overlap and gaps between safety net-sites of care, as well as their intersection with established measures of need. The online data display tool will inform ongoing primary care safety-net planning in anticipation of broadened utilization under national health reform. Conclusions: This GIS-informed process and display tool offers New Orleans stakeholders, policymakers, and planners a means to convert otherwise dormant clinical and population data into a powerful and visually-compelling format for health care and community health planning and permit informed decisions in the allocation of scarce safety-net resources.