The Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care

http://www.dartmouthatlas.org/

Lauren Minnick

Purpose and Use of GIS ¡  The Dartmouth Project uses GIS to map Medicare

data in order to analyze and highlight variations in the distribution of healthcare in the US.

¡  The project hopes to improve the disparities in health and the healthcare system by highlighting these differences with an interactive interface.

The homepage offers an example map (Coronary Bypass Grafting Procedures per 1,000 Medicare Enrollees, 2007) which the user can edit by customizing the report or adjusting the layers of the map.

In this screenshot I have utilized the customize option to change the region type from hospital referral region to state. The user is also able to adjust the Year and gender.

The navigation bar at the top of the homepage allows the user to create there own map. One can choose to start with 3 options: data by region, data by hospital, and

data by topic.

A search bar at the bottom of the home page also allows the user to search for data by zip code.

Some of the data by topic options are listed above.

I chose Quality/Effective care, which generated a map of the Percentage of Diabetic Medicare Enrollees Receiving Appropriate Management, By Race and Type of Screening.

Above I chose to customize the map by changing the type of screening from Hemoglobin A1c to a Blood Lipids Test. Based on the adjusted map, it appears that more enrollees who receive a Blood Lipid Test are receiving appropriate management of their Diabetes.

Conclusion -The Dartmouth Atlas of Healthcare provides a very user friendly tool for accessing analytic maps relating to Medicare data. -The site offers a large variety of analytic maps and allows the user to browse by region, hospital, or topic. I found the maps clear and easy to read and the tools for customizing the map and adding/changing layers were extremely intuitive. -While the stated goal of the site is to “help policymakers, the media, health care analysts and others improve their understanding of the efficiency and effectiveness of our health care system,” the system’s ease of use prevents it from alienating someone with a casual interest.

References:

Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care. N.p., n.d. Web. 17 Jan. 2013.