The Health Center Mapping Tool
Primary health care clinics and the patients they serve are often bound to one another by geography. The characteristics of this geography are often assumed, and they are rarely studied or used in the process of clinical services planning. Understanding this population landscape and the variations in their use of care is important if overall access to primary care is to be improved, but assessing access across communities or even states, can be difficult. (Knickman, 1998; Halfon, 1999). One potential means of capturing and displaying geographic variations in access to care is through the use of geographic information systems (GIS), which permit the combination of many data sources into dynamic analytic maps. Geographic information systems have been helpful for understanding a variety of health care issues such as defining hospital service areas, examining the affect of distance on access, and disease patterns.(Farley 1977, Wennberg 2000, Kohli 1995, Fryer 1999, Love 1995, Becker 1998, Parchman 1999) However, the potential of GIS to measure access to care at a community level has not been fully realized.
The Health Center Mapping Tool allows you to bring together varied sources of health-related information to answer your questions about health and healthcare. You can:
- Create maps
- Displaying the service area of your clinic, or of patient subpopulations
- Showing the density of service your clinic provides in each geography
- Showing the distribution of your patients or of selected subpopulations of patients
- About the neighborhood that you serve
- About relationships between your program or clinic and legislators
- View tables
- Discover
- Neighborhood characteristics in the area surrounding your clinic
- Save and print your maps and tables to share with patients, payors, and policy-makers
This tool will help you as you prepare grant applications, interact with payors and policy-makers, plan service expansion, and in conducting community oriented primary care (COPC). See the Articles tab for examples of how other clinics have used mapping in these and other ways.
Please contact us if you are interested in adding data from your clinic (stored securely and available only to site administrators and you) or your community to this site for mapping.
The Health Center Mapping Tool is a component of HealthLandscape, a collaboration of the Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati and the American Academy of Family Physicians. We also gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the National Association of Community Health Centers.
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