In the most recent ESRI Healthy GIS newsletter, there were a
number of interesting applications of GIS in the health care
sector. Two such interesting projects were based in teaching
hospitals: The University of Kentucky Hospital, and Stanford
University Medical Center. While used for different purposes,
these application show the true power of GIS when they harness
meaningful health care and demographic data. The University of
Kentucky employed a combination of AutoCAD drawings and ArcGIS
server to build an application that tracks assets within its
Level 1 Trauma Center. Users can edit room assets on the fly, as
well as view images of the rooms and the assets contained. There
could be many uses for such an application including: -
Generation of a near real-time census to track room utilization
- Tracking of potentially hazardous conditions within hospitals
- Assisting in monitoring bed changes and patient flow Stanford
University goes beyond some of the more common health care uses
for GIS such as population