Victoria’s Surgical Mortality Rates and other Health GIS News
Esri Australia GIS in Health specialist Jeremy Pytel said the audit [in the Australian state of Victoria]used GIS technology to map and analyse complex patient health care data and deliver an insight into mortality rates.
The press release does not share any such insights nor link to any maps.
An artilcle at HealthLeaders Media discusses the use of GIS for recruiting medical staff. One story of note:
For instance, when 885-bed Stanford University Medical Center decided to add more nurses to the 2,700 registered nurses it currently employs, Schutt used GIS to learn more about the nurses already working at organization as well as those in the area. Using the combined internal and external analytics on the workforce data, the leaders could see a dot-map of details about the staff. The map indicated where pools of nurses with the right skill set were located and it also showed the system's current nursing supply and licensure levels, and other key recruiting details such as employee commuting patterns and distance traveled to work.
"The data showed us that on average nurses at Stanford lived within 12 miles of the hospital," says Schutt. "It also showed us that a large number of nurses would be nearing retirement."
Not only would the health system need to fill new openings but it may need to fill many more in the near future, explains Schutt, a 20-year human resources veteran who has worked for organizations such as Nortel, HP, and Kaiser Permanente. The GIS map included regional nurse geo-analytics, so HR could pinpoint where to look for new recruits.
Whittlesea in Victoria is more likely to see deaths form a heatwave than a fire.
Whittlesea council’s relief and recovery co-ordinator, Andrew Tierney, told a council-run workshop on community vulnerability and resilience that residents should take heat-related illnesses seriously.
‘‘Heatwave is far and away our greatest risk,’’ he said.
‘‘People don’t take it seriously; they think fire is more dangerous. But the five-day heatwave in 2009 killed 374 people statewide, far more than the Black Saturday fires.’’
Mr Tierney said geospatial mapping, which applies statistical analysis and other techniques to geographic data, had shown that Lalor and Thomastown were ‘‘heat sinks’’.
