Key GIS Insights, Trends, and Happenings that Healthcare Should Know About

May 6, 2022
John Lynn
6 Min Read

This week I had the honor of attending and speaking at the Esri Health and Human Services GIS Conference in Redlands, CA. The event brought together some of the top health experts in GIS (Geographic Information System Mapping) from across the healthcare industry. Kicking off the event was a talk by Jack Dangermond, Founder and President at Esri. He offered what I think are some really important insights, trends, and happenings in the world of GIS that can benefit healthcare. Here’s my summary of those key GIS insights that every healthcare professional should know about.

This truly was one of the most actionable data events I’d been to for healthcare. The work they’re doing is incredible since it so often leads to direct actions that benefit patients and populations.

Many have said this before, but cross industry collaboration is one of the most powerful things we can do. Plus, many think that healthcare is one industry, but it’s clear to me that it’s still cross industry collaboration if we’re working across providers, payers, public health, etc.

Dangermond opened up for comments from the attendees to start his session and this comment stood out. There are a lot of dashboards when you’re working with as much data as they do in the world of GIS.

This was a key learning for me from the event. Yes, GIS does maps, but there’s so much more. In fact, what was eye-opening to me at the event was how many ways GIS can be used across healthcare. It’s actually the problem. It can be used everywhere, so where do you start.

This matches a trend in tech that we’ve seen where user input is driving so many things. Great to see it happening with GIS too.

This slide definitely leaves a mark on you when you see it. There are a lot of challenges in the world. As I said in the tweet, it’s amazing to see how many healthcare are involved in and how GIS solutions can help to better understand and address these problems.

This reinforces the point above that GIS is more than maps. It’s really a way of thinking about data and diving into data. Plus, a process for how to use that data to do something good.

It’s clear the GIS infrastructure is in place now to do do amazing things. The next tweet illustrates this even more.

Mind boggling to consider.

I’d never heard of story maps, but the idea of sharing a story using GIS data and imagery is an important and fascinating one.

Data science is eating healthcare (kind of). It’s interesting to think of GIS as a subset of a broader data science effort.

I didn’t dive deep into this, but I’m fascinated by the idea and I want to learn more about how this really works.

We can do this now. Are we?

I loved this so much that I repeated it in my presentation. What’s powerful is that the images and dashboards that GIS solutions like Esri create can communicate something so quickly and powerfully, that it can engender trust in ways that other efforts can’t.

How are you using GIS in your organization?  Where would you like it to be used?  Do you have a GIS office?  Should you have a GIS office?  Let us know in the comments or on social media.

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John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

1 Comment

  • Thanks for the summary John. You captured a lot of the key points beautifully. I see a lot of opportunity to transform healthcare with support from GIS.

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