TITLE:
Geovisualization: A Newer GIS Technology for Implementation Research in Health
AUTHORS:
Sandul Yasobant, Kranti Suresh Vora, Carl Hughes, Ashish Upadhyay, Dileep V. Mavalankar
KEYWORDS:
Geovisualization, GIS, Public Health
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Geographic Information System,
Vol.7 No.1,
February
2,
2015
ABSTRACT: Use of GIS in public
health is currently limited to tracking immunizations, disease surveillance,
and establishing new service areas. The potential of GIS to improve planning,
implementation and monitoring of programs and to inform policymaking processes
for universal access to healthcare is grossly underutilized. Major reasons for
restricted use are paid access to GIS software and difficult interpretation for
non-GIS professionals. WebGIS technologies present an opportunity for non-GIS
public health professionals to present complex data and findings in simpler
manner. Conventional GIS methods and Geovisualization are compared and
contrasted in this paper using data from the MATIND project in the Gujarat
state of India. In-depth literature review on GIS techniques used in health
implementation research was conducted. In this paper, MATIND data have been
used for comparing conventional GIS methods with a newer web based GIS
tool-Geovisualization. GIS software is more useful for analytical purposes;
whereas web based geovisualization techniques are much better for visualization
and easy interpretation of results by non GIS public health researchers. As the
images are easy to interpret, interactive/dynamic and not much technical
expertise is required to perform basic analysis, the tool is useful for policy
makers and planners. Geovisualization provides a user-friendly tool for
presenting large scale community based survey data. Increased use of this tool
will help to present implementation research in a creative way to the program
planners and policy makers. For program managers, it is a useful tool to
monitor implementation and impact of a program to improve health of population.