The Primary Care Atlas
Primary health care clinics and the populations they serve are bound to one another by geography. Understanding the characteristics of this geography is essential for policymakers to promote a primary care workforce capable of meeting national, state and local needs, and for clinicians to better understand the communities and populations they serve. Geographic information systems (GIS), permit the combination of many data sources into dynamic analytic maps, and 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 enhance our understanding of the regional impact and characteristics of primary care has not been fully realized.
The Primary Care Atlas allows you to bring together varied sources of health-related information to answer your questions about health and healthcare. You can:
- Create maps
- Showing whether your clinic is in a health professional shortage area(HPSA) or physician scarcity area
- Showing the impact of removing one or more primary care specialty on the HPSA status of counties in the nation or your state
- About your residency program and its impact locally, regionally, and nationally
- About the distribution of physician specialties locally, regionally, and nationally
- About populations in your community
- View tables
- Discover
- if your clinic is in an area potentially eligible for Medicare bonus payment
- if your clinic is in a designated underserved area
- community characteristics around your clinic
- Save and print your maps and tables to share with patients, payors, and policy-makers
This tool will appeal to providers, residency programs, policy-makers, advocates, community leaders, and to patients. As the Primary Care Atlas grows, new data will be added, so please return to the site to explore new mapping opportunities.
The Primary Care Atlas is a component of HealthLandscape, a collaboration of the Health Foundation of Greater Cincinnati and the American Academy of Family Physicians.
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