Global Health and the World Health Mapper

Today, half the world’s population cannot access essential health services. Millions of women give birth without help from a skilled attendant; millions of children miss out on vaccinations against killer diseases, and millions suffer and die because they can’t get treatment for HIV, TB, and malaria. In 2019, this is simply unacceptable.

Statement by WHO Director-General on World Health Day 2019

HealthLandscape has developed the World Health Mapper as part of the American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) Center for Global Health Initiatives (CGHI)  The CGHI aims to support AAFP members' professional efforts to be globally engaged, and promote family medicine and population-based, patient-centered, primary health care on a global scale.

The World Health Mapper includes international health measures of Key Health Indicators, Healthcare Spending, Workforce, Child Health, and the distribution of Global Family Medicine.  The Mapper draws data primarily from the World Bank, as well as detailed data on the reach of Global Family Medicine training culled from AAFP data stores.

The World Health Mapper is a powerful tool for visualizing and understanding global health
data, including a variety of country-level health indicators that can be displayed using maps, tables, bar charts, trend graphs, as well as the ability to examine relationships between two indicators with side- by-side comparison maps.



I had a great time introducing the World Health Mapper at the 2019 AAFP Global Health Summit held October 9-12 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  Our presentation was well attended and participants offered suggestions on additions to the tool, including not only more statistics, but also substantive information about health and social conditions "on the ground" in each country. Students, residents, and others can use these data when considering international training and residency programs. I appreciate their feedback and we're reviewing their suggestions for inclusion in an update to the World Health Mapper.


This was the first Global Health Summit I had attended, and I was really blown away by the excitement and passion attendees and presenters had for their work.  I saw two days of thought provoking presentations, but what stuck out in my mind was a Friday morning session "Practicing Global Health in Your Own Backyard", presented by Leopoldine Matialeu and Regina Wang from the University of California, San Diego.  They demonstrated how, with a range of immigrants, asylum seekers, or refugees already living in the US, it is possible to design and implement a residency curriculum that addresses patients from different backgrounds and cultures, without the need to traveling to other countries.  This was very exciting and we're brainstorming at HealthLandscape about how we can use HealthLandscape tools to support similar efforts around the U.S.






I admit, it was also very cool that (serendipitously?) the Global Health Summit overlapped somewhat with an international balloon festival being held in Albuquerque that same week.  I didn't get a chance to go over to the festival, but the wind was kind enough to send some of the balloons over our way early one morning.  Beautiful!

Mark Carrozza
Director
HealthLandscape

Impressions from URISA GIS-Pro 2019

Another year, another exciting time at Urban and Regional Information System Association’s (URISA) annual GIS-Pro conference. This time I traded the dry, desert landscape of Palm Springs (last year’s conference) for the overbearing humidity and heat of New Orleans. Not only was I looking forward to exploring a new city, but I attended this year’s GIS-Pro wearing two hats, one as a presenter, and one as chapter leader of one of URISA’s regional chapters. I was there to learn, connect, eat, have fun, and explore. One of the great things about working with HealthLandscape is that I have the opportunity to attend conferences like GIS-Pro, gain professional development, and present on the work that we do. 

Traditionally, the conference is preceded by a full-day array of workshops. This year, I attended one on GIS in program management, where I gained insight into strategic and implementation planning, financial management, and other challenges that program managers face in the geospatial world. At the plenary the next day, I learned about the Earth as Art program, where the University of Louisiana Lafayette is seeking to turn satellite imagery of the earth into high resolution art galleries. The keynote came from the NOAA Office for Coastal Management. They presented on their efforts to map the coast of the United States so that high resolution data can be readily available at the local level Working in a diverse industry like GIS, it’s easy to fall behind in topics that aren’t covered by my role at HealthLandscape. I see opportunities like conference plenaries to stay abreast of what’s being done at other organizations.

In one of the education sessions, the presenters explored various methods for employing GIS in the cloud. They spoke about best practices for creating data for cloud environments and how data and server management are changing. They demonstrated, through the use of Python programming, that cause and effect actions, called triggers, can be applied to databases so that processes can be automated. This was insightful to hear as the next day I would give a talk on improving workflows using programming in GIS. Over the past year, HealthLandscape has sought out ways to make certain tasks more efficient with the use of Python programming. From projects where the output is multiple maps showing the distribution of various health care specialties for each state to automating multi-step geocoding and processing tasks, HealthLandscape has been employing programming to optimize how we manage data and produce static map deliverables.

Over the last year I have been working to restart a once-dormant URISA local chapter. I attended GIS-Pro to represent the Chesapeake chapter to continue that effort. At each GIS-Pro, there is an annual chapter leader’s forum meeting with the URISA board of directors and other chapter representatives. This is an opportunity to bring up concerns, ask questions, and to hear from the board of directors about the changes that affect how chapters are administered. As a leader, I also took this meeting as an opportunity to learn how other chapters are being run and the struggles that they’re facing as they relate to membership retention, budgeting, governance, and education. On the last day of the conference I volunteered for the GIS-Pro 2020 conference planning committee. Since next year’s GIS-Pro will take place in Baltimore, Maryland, it will be an opportunity to connect with local GIS professionals and to show off the reinvigorated Chesapeake Chapter.

Laissez les bons temps rouler!

Dave Grolling

GIS Strategist

HealthLandscape

National Primary Care Week (NPCW) 2019 will be held October 7 – 11

This week marks the 20th year for National Primary Care Week, a week led by medical students with an interest in specializing in primary care. The week focuses on ensuring we have new health care providers interested in practicing primary care and addressing issues that many primary care providers encounter, including addressing health disparities.

HealthLandscape builds tools that may be helpful as you embark on National Primary Care Week, providing data to better understand healthcare workforce shortages and maldistribution as well as socioeconomic, demographic, and population health data. As you celebrate National Primary Care Week, visit these tools:

October 7: Building the Primary Care Workforce
Use the HealthLandscape Workforce Explorer (https://www.healthlandscape.org/workforceexplorer/) to look at data related to where providers of primary care practice across the U.S.and compare it to the population. What areas have high population to provider ratios? Is one primary care specialty carrying more of the primary care burden than others?

October 9: Your Primary Care: Getting into Residency
Use the HealthLandscape Residency Footprinter (https://www.healthlandscape.org/residency-footprint/) to look at the areas that are served by graduates of Family Medicine residency programs. Explore what areas would be underserved areas if we withdrew the graduates from a residency program to see the social impact Family Medicine has across the country.

October 10: Health Disparities Day of Action 

Almost all of the tools in the HealthLandscape stable have information on social determinants of health. Visit https://www.healthlandscape.org for a list of tools or visit these in particular:

• The Population Health Mapper (https://www.healthlandscape.org/populationhealth/) has county level data on social determinants of health that users can add to see what areas are cold spots for health- those areas where many SDOH factors stack up are the ones that are likely to have high health care needs.
  
• Similarly, the 500 Cities Mapper (https://www.healthlandscape.org/500cities/) does the same thing but at a census tract level for the 500 largest cities in the United States.

If you have questions or comments, we’d love to hear from you. We’d also like to know how you found HealthLandscape tools useful (or not) as you use them to inform your National Primary Care Week work and beyond.




Jennifer Rankin, PhD
Senior Manager, Research and Product Services, HealthLandscape