Spatially Connected Health Data

Background:  Hospitals are now required to acquire significant public health competencies as they move towards more of a risk environment.  Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can be the glue that pulls the diverse information together to inform strategic decisions within the health systems of the future. 

Objective and Purpose:  Attendees will be exposed to the lessons learned within a health system implementing a system real-time community health management system to provide geographically enabled health utilization information to influence strategic resource, patient care, and population health decisions.

Methods:  Overview of lessons learned, partnerships required, and the necessary competencies within leadership to fulfill a collective vision of health in a region.  The discussion of the development of a regional collective impact model and examples of the data platform used for public health and how that connects to patient data inside a health system. 

Results:  GIS can be a powerful tool in creating a new vision for health improvement and allocation of health services in communities.  It can also be a tool that connects public health to health systems to create more collaborative community health needs assessments. 

Discussion/Conclusion:

The importance of connecting community health to strategic directions for health systems, cast a vision for the new roles of health systems in public health, and outline the importance of geography in understanding big data.  Increasing our communication and interaction with our communities will be critical as we move forward with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.