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The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
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The 130th Annual Meeting of APHA |
Robert L. Williams, MD, MPH and Aaron Allen, PhD. Family and Community Medicine, University of New Mexico, 2400 Tucker Ave. NE, Albuquerque, NM 87131, 505-272-2165, rlwilliams@salud.unm.edu
Community oriented primary care (COPC) is an attractive model for linking public health and primary care. In COPC, a community’s health needs and resources are defined using both qualitative and quantitative methods. Though COPC offers potential for increasing a community’s preventive care, for integrating communities into their primary care, and for targeting scarce resources to priority needs, its application has been limited by a lack of feasible methods for putting it in place.
In a series of projects, applications have been developed using geographic information systems (GIS) software to assist with quantitative community assessment for COPC. These applications can display, in user-friendly formats, the distribution of community-wide health indicators over time and space. By linking community and primary care practice measures, unmet health needs and areas of high need can be identified. Costs, barriers, limitations, and benefits of these tools have been examined. Example maps and tables developed using these tools will be presented. (For one example, see http://hscwebdev.unm.edu/devfcm/datamapping/.)
Recent developments in geographic information systems (GIS) technology have made available key tools for applying the COPC model. Public health organizations can play a critical role in developing health indicator “storehouses” with mapping capabilities that would support not just COPC, but also data on the distribution of health measures to a variety of users. Public health departments are in the best position for developing this important health planning capability and for bringing this data to many community members who would not otherwise have access to it.
Learning Objectives:
Keywords: Information Systems,
Presenting author's disclosure statement:
I do not have any significant financial interest/arrangement or affiliation with any organization/institution whose products or services are being discussed in this session.