Socha,
Y. M., Oelschlegel, S., Vaughn, C. J., & Earl, M. (2012). Improving an
outreach service by analyzing the relationship of health information disparities
to socioeconomic indicators using geographic information systems. J Med
Lib Assoc, 100 (3), 222-225.
Disparity in income and other resources
has long been known to have an effect on the assistance, as well as knowledge
of potential assistance sources, for different communities. Many organizations attempting to educate and provide
services to communities have struggled with outreach campaigns due to the
difficulty in pinpointing specific regions of the communities they serve that
require the most attention to make such campaigns successful in their goals.
One such organization, the Preston
Medical Library in Preston, Tennessee, provides a free over-the-telephone
service called the Consumer and Patient Health Information Service (CAPHIS). Community members can call CAPHIS with
questions regarding health information and the staff will respond over the
phone and with information packets sent in the mail. Unfortunately, some of the
regions of the community most in need of the free service often were unaware of
its existence.
In order to yield a more
successful outreach campaign to account for some of this disparity, Library
staff combined location data from calls to CAPHIS (zip codes) and county data
from the U.S. Census regarding race, age, disease, and socio-economic levels in
the ArcMap program. This allowed staff
members to identify regions of the county that had a higher rate of disease or
a larger number of elderly or low-income individuals and yet from which there
was little to no record of calls to CAPHIS.
The spatial analysis created in ArcMap with the combined data provided
Library staff the information needed to improve their outreach campaigns in a
very clear manner that was easy to understand, highlighting one of the many
potential uses of GIS programs in community development/service organizations. 
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ReplyDeleteThis article is a great example of how GIS technology can be used to gather, synthesize and anaylize information to better target outreach campaigns. From what I gathered with my own article, GIS is a a very useful tool in locating audiences/markets to target.
ReplyDeleteI love that this article demonstrates methods that GIS can be used with a humanistic approach, rather than purely for scientific research. The article shows us that GIS can be used in a variety of situations.
ReplyDelete