GIS Data Sharing – A Model for Healthcare Data Interoperability?

For more than a decade, healthcare has struggled with sharing data. We have not achieved data interoperability despite an abundance of technology, standards, and legislation. As an industry, we often point at the banking industry as a model to aspire to, but perhaps a better exemplar is the GIS community. They share their data using open standards and common platforms because they share a common goal – to make the world a better place.

Healthcare Data Interoperability

Data in healthcare is siloed. The Electronic Health Record systems (EHRs) that have been deployed over the past 15 years do a good job at capturing health data but are terrible at sharing it. Only recently have EHR vendors begun rolling out APIs, adopting standards, and developing tools to make their data more interoperable.

At the micro-level, the lack of data interoperability means that patient data cannot be easily shared between the hospital that the patient visited and the family physician that regularly takes care of them…or between the nursing home and the urgent care clinic.

At a macro-level, the lack of interoperability hampers community health efforts. It takes a lot of time, energy, technology, and skill for any public-health or population-health entity to combine health data from different healthcare organizations. Hospital A’s data must be cleaned, manipulated, and reformatted before it can be combined with Hospital B’s data.

It doesn’t have to be this way. If healthcare data was fully interoperable, care providers, payers, and government agencies could focus more of their precious resources to keep people healthy – a common goal shared by all.

Inspiration From Outside of Healthcare

For years, the banking industry has been used as an example of full data interoperability. Transactions from one financial institution are seamlessly sent to other institutions without any manual manipulation. The data itself is in a standardized format that all institutions adhere to. What the banking industry has achieved is incredible, but it is not an ideal comparison for healthcare.

There is a compelling financial incentive for banks to be interoperable. There is no such driver in healthcare. Without data interoperability, the banking industry would grind to a halt. The same is not true in healthcare where organizations can happily continue to care for patients without the need to share their data with anyone.

Even though I believe the banking analogy is flawed, I have not seen a better interoperability example for healthcare to use as inspiration…that is until I attended the Esri User Conference and saw first-hand how the Geographic Information System (GIS) community shares their data without any financial incentive or legal mandate to do so.

GIS Community

Esri is the global market leader in GIS software, location intelligence, and mapping. Since 1969 they have helped governments and industries around the world leverage the power of geographic science and geospatial analysis to solve problems.

At the 2022 Esri User Conference I was struck by how willing everyone was to share their GIS data. It didn’t matter if they were a county government, a federal agency, a non-profit organization, or a for-profit company. If their data could be helpful, they were willing to make it available.

For example, many county governments running Esri’s ArcGIS System, have made their wastewater data openly available. Many public health agencies and some hospitals use that data as part of their planning – for ER surges and for where to target community programs like vaccinations and education.

SightSavers, a non-profit organization that works to eliminate avoidable blindness, combines GIS data from different government sources to pinpoint areas of Africa where their sight treatment and prevention programs are most needed.

Check out more interesting health + GIS use cases in this article and this short video.

Sharing GIS Data For the Good of All

The GIS community recognizes the power of data sharing and interoperability. They have seen how big problems can be solved by pooling their datasets together. Problems that would have been impossible to solve manually, like knowing where in Africa blindness is increasing, are suddenly solvable with ingenuity + GIS data.

What was most inspiring, was the complete lack of a financial incentive to drive this sharing behavior.

In the opening session, Esri Founder and President, Jack Dangermond, highlighted how collaboration (and data sharing) was at the heart of GIS community and how the collaboration allowed the community to address complex problems.

As I listened to Dangermond, I couldn’t help thinking wistfully about the day someone could stand on a stage and present a slide like this, but full of healthcare challenges that we banded together to solve, like:

  • Drug addiction
  • Food insecurity
  • Access to care
  • Care affordability
  • Workforce burnout
  • Medication affordability

[Note: GIS can play a role in addressing all the above]

Ability to Share Data

Baked into the ArcGIS System are multiple ways for users to share data internally and externally.

“One of the simplest ways to share data is through ArcGIS Online,” explained Jared Shoultz, Esri HHS Solution Engineer Team Lead. “Once the data is loaded there, the data owner can choose to share it with their entire organizations, selected ‘groups’, or publicly. The data can then be discovered by keywords, categories, or a variety of other search mechanisms.”

Esri also provides a set of APIs that allow organizations to share their GIS data more seamlessly and in real-time. The APIs are accessible as GeoJSON and GeoService.

Living Atlas

Over the years, so many organizations have made their GIS data available that Esri decided to help the community by curating the best datasets from authoritative sources. The result was “ArcGIS Living Atlas of the World – the foremost collection of geographic information from around the globe.”

“Living Atlas items are a subset of all the items in ArcGIS Online that have been shared publicly,” said Diana Lavery, ArcGIS Living Atlas Team. “Living Atlas items are rewarded within ArcGIS searches in that they rise to the top, and they are ‘stamped’ with a Living Atlas icon, so GIS analysts know this is an Esri-recommended item. Some come from our contributors who are the authoritative source for that particular dataset, such as CDC or FEMA.”

All datasets accepted into the Living Atlas are reviewed and require associated metadata.

For healthcare specifically, there are pre-built maps that show the usage of depression prescription drugs (by region), insomnia prescription drugs, wastewater readings, locations of healthcare facilities around the world, etc. The list is extensive.

A Model for Healthcare Interoperability

The Esri User Conference confirmed what I have long believed: that the GIS community is a good model for data interoperability – one that we can learn from in healthcare. We don’t have to imagine what could be achieved if healthcare organizations shared data openly, easily, and in a standardized format…they are already doing that in the GIS world.

In fact, we should use GIS + Health Data to spur interoperability efforts. Making health data available in GIS format means it becomes immediately useful and usable to other members of the healthcare ecosystem. This will build further momentum for healthcare data sharing.

The road to healthcare data interoperability is a difficult one, but maybe the map to get there is now available.

About the author

Colin Hung

Colin Hung is the co-founder of the #hcldr (healthcare leadership) tweetchat one of the most popular and active healthcare social media communities on Twitter. Colin speaks, tweets and blogs regularly about healthcare, technology, marketing and leadership. He is currently an independent marketing consultant working with leading healthIT companies. Colin is a member of #TheWalkingGallery. His Twitter handle is: @Colin_Hung.

   

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