Understanding the impacts of “place” leads to better health and strengthens public health preparedness

The Coleman Group supports a range of GIS-facilitated communication and collaboration efforts.

Situational awareness is critical to providing accurate and timely information to the public. Regardless of the type of health crisis or the need for human support and services, stakeholders need a picture of what and where events are taking place and where and what the needs are. Clear communication and effective collaboration are key to a successful outreach, every health crisis requires support from a wide variety of disciplines, including public safety, human services, and health care.

As technologies evolve and mobile devices proliferate the market, public and private entities across the world have access to an extraordinary amount of fast-evolving and improving information. The amount and type of data can be overwhelming to collect, analyze, and deliver. Equally, challenging is the ability to aggregate, organize, synthesize that data into actionable information and deliver it in real or near-real time to multiple sources, humans, machines, or other devices.

Stakeholders and audiences need a common operational picture of what is happening and where so that they can communicate and collaborate effectively. GIS supports a range of communication and collaboration efforts. It can provide operationally relevant insights that enable decision-makers to provide meaningful solutions for a variety of challenging circumstances.

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This approach leads to accurately identifying public health needs by removing the ambiguity of words and replacing it with a clear picture.

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Empowering health professionals by providing accurate data and science-based analysis can lead to better public awareness and decision-making. Communicating accurate health information is enhanced by identifying the primary audience and based on their geographic location geosocial influences, and area-specific health needs. This approach leads to accurately identifying public health needs by removing the ambiguity of words and replacing it with a clear picture.

Understanding the impacts of place leads to better health and strengthens public health preparedness. We can help achieve this goal by providing location-based accurate information via customized web mapping applications. Furthermore, online real-time or near real-time data analyses further increase and enhance accurate information delivery.

Geographic information systems (GIS) answer the question of where: where diseases are prevalent; where vulnerable populations live; and where resources are most needed to improve health conditions. GIS is helping public, private, and non-profit organizations make effective and efficient decisions, from collecting data to analyzing it to presenting it in a user-friendly manner.

In the past 2 years alone, health professionals, and government agencies have used GIS capabilities to address the COVID-19 pandemic, opioid epidemic, and other diseases and injuries.

Maps and apps enable public health officials to coordinate efforts with other agencies and external stakeholders. Technologies such as GIS provide communication and engagement hubs for everyone, public or private.

The ability to extract useful and meaningful information from massive amounts of data, mapped out, and effectively presented, ensures the decision-makers have access to the correct information, regardless of where they are located.