VERTICES Brings Interactive Community Mapping to Nashville via IM Nashville!

In order to involve and interconnect the community of Nashville, Tennessee, the company VERTICES, LLC. has created its  “IM Nashville” project. The purpose of IM Nashville is to research and develop interactive maps that show the analysis of secondary data of health outcomes, and social and environmental determinants of health disparities. Using GIS (geographic information systems) will increase the speed of the information’s availability. IM Nashville has three main goals: enhance research capacity analyzing social environments and their effects on health disparities, using community based participatory research; expand research training and career development opportunities in health disparities; engage investigators and members of the community to collaborate in all phases of health disparities research. The idea here is to bring people together and get them involved, all while providing an informative public website. In order to improve health status and equity it is important to have policies and organizational practices in which reduce health disparities. By using interactive community mapping, the people of Nashville will be able to understand factors affecting their specific community, ultimately leading to strategic responses. It will allow for effective analysis of epidemiological data and reveal trends that would otherwise be too difficult to discover in other formats. Nashville is continuing the popular trend of using GIS to: “identify health problems; monitor health status; assess barriers to services and care; more efficiently and effectively target high-need, underserved populations; locate new services; enhance health planning; persuade decision-makers; and display accomplishments.” VERTICES, an innovative GIS Technology company based in New Jersey, focuses on providing feasible interactive mapping solutions with the benefits of Open Source technology. The company is also invovled in many other health status  and equity projects all across the country. IM Nashville is available through the site http://www.imnashville.com/home/

Source: http://www.imnashville.com/home/

Christine Irven, VERTICES intern

GIS Enables South Carolina to have Effective Emergency Response

(Picture taken from http://www.scdhec.gov/gis/maps_hlthdists.aspx)

In order to efficiently and effectively process and distribute large amounts of data, South Carolina’s Department of Health and Environmental Control needed a way to distribute health data and emergency information to the public that was feasible, allowed several levels of access and keep data current . That’s where GIS comes in. GIS allows health officials to make information available to the public without dealing with the issues of time and budget constraints, or privacy concerns all while providing for an efficient and effective emergency management system. The Department of Health and Environmental Control decided to implement ESRI’s applications, such as ‘Street Map’ allowing anyone to view accurate and current street data. It also allows users to ask questions and research any statistical information they want to know, including health services locations.The implementation of GIS has allowed the Department of Health and Environmental Control to update information as currently as possible, study vast boundaries without spending a lot of time or manual labor, and provides easy online access to anyone who wishes and/ or needs to be informed. One additional and positive effectof the application allows users to locate Department of Social Services, American Red Cross Emergency Operations Center, and shelters close to their home in the event of an emergency.

Source: ESRI

http://www.esri.com/library/fliers/pdfs/cs-southcarolina.pdf

Picture below taken from: http://www.scdhec.gov/images/dhec_logo.gif

Christine Irven, VERTICES intern