Geographic information systems are useful for propelling population health planning in imaging, according to an analysis published Saturday in the Journal of the American College of Radiology.
Providers have previously put such analytics tools to use in public health programs to help map out and visualize data, but their use has been scarce in the specialty. A recent PubMed query found just 73 citations for GIS and radiology out of 11,393 publications.
Researchers with Johns Hopkins Hospital and Rad-Aid International recently set out to explore this topic, determining that geographic information systems warrant greater proliferation in imaging.
“GIS provided a robust multi-site analysis for estimating the potential global population reached by an international radiology outreach organization (Rad-Aid) with targeted individual site measurements,” radiologist Ryan England, MD, a resident at Baltimore-based Hopkins and medical airship manager with Rad-Aid, and colleagues wrote Oct. 23. “Given heightened needs to accurately characterize global outreach populations, this GIS-based approach may be useful for analysis, outreach planning, and resource allocation among global health organizations.”
Their analysis covered populations served by 78 low-resource medical facilities across 32 countries, which have partnered with the Chevy Chase, Maryland-headquartered nonprofit. England et al. utilized GIS to calculate populations within reach of those facilities, incorporating publicly available geospatial input databases such as population and land-cover information and road locations from OpenStreetMap.
The authors used three constraints to estimate patient catchment areas—one-hour driving time, one-hour walking time and 10-mile circular radius. Total populations served by Rad-Aid sites based on those three factors were more than 189 million, 26 million and nearly 111 million, respectively. Meanwhile, median populations treated at each individual location was nearly 1.8 million when using one-hour driving time, with an average life expectancy of 68.4 years. Median child mortality prior to age 5 was 3.8%, and median prevalence of human immunodeficiency virus infection was 3.1%.
England et al. see such analyses as crucial, given the “capital-intensive nature” of radiology and limited mobility of imaging equipment. They gave the examples of setting up mammography clinics in areas with high populations of age-appropriate women or strategically locating ultrasound offerings to improve prenatal care in rural areas.
“GIS data can help inform on the strategic implementation of imaging and radiation oncologic services, such as to increase access to needed healthcare on the basis of previously unavailable and/or inaccessible services,” the authors noted. “Geographic data points may not typically come to mind as a contributing factor to health, but by incorporating these data into decision algorithms, organizations can account for these otherwise hidden variables that may influence the effectiveness of outreach efforts.”
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.