Tag: Public Health

  • Introducing the Open Healthcare Access Map

    Open Healthcare Access Map is a new web application by HeiGIT to provide insights into healthcare supply on different spatial scales for many countries worldwide. The web application is available here: https://apps.heigit.org/healthcare_access/. Please note that this is a prototype and feedback on improvements and desired functionalities is very welcome. You can reach us at this…

  • Insights into OpenStreetMap healthcare attributes in India over time

    Last November, we covered the recent increase of healthcare related objects in OpenStreetMap (OSM) in India. In less than a year, the amount of facilities has increased from 6.956 to 48.101. This is mainly due to an import run by RMSI – an Indian GIS consulting company. In this blog we will take a closer look at…

  • Updated OSM Healthcare in Senegal (2020)

    OpenStreetMap (OSM) offers many possibilities and holds potential in the area of freely available infrastructure data for the health sector. Nevertheless, it is important to underline that the quality of the information is different in each country, since the mapping activity is strongly affected by the size of the community of volunteers. Monetary barriers prevent…

  • Accessibility to pharmacies in Germany with 15km Covid-19 restriction

    Current lockdown regulations in Germany state that – in many but not all federal states – travel in COVID-19 hotspot regions is only allowed up to 15km distance. This has raised concerns since a 15km radius has been perceived by some as a serious constraint especially in rural regions. Clearly, this might prevent visits to…

  • Accessibility of covid-19 vaccination centers in Germany

    Updated based on newly available vaccination center locations at the 14th of January 2021. Vaccination of a sufficiently large share of the population is considered the most important action to fight the spread of SARS-CoV -2 and resulting COVID-19 infections. Germany has started together with the majority of EU member states at the 27th of…

  • New Jupyter Notebook: Analysis of Access to Health Care using openrouteservice Isochrones API

    What is the idea behind the Notebook? In the case of an emergency (e.g. floods, earthquakes, political crisis) it is important to know where the health facilities are located. Furthermore, it is important to identify which cities/districts have a reduced or no access at all to health facilities before an emergency. Many countries still posses…

  • Recent changes to OpenStreetMap healthcare infrastructure in India

    India accounts for nearly 18% of the worlds population. The country is also one of the main carrier of the worlds disease burden. Despite the general increase in life expectancy and decreasing mortality due to communicable diseases and malnutrition in recent years, the numbers of non-communicable diseases are rising substantially. Cardiovascular diseases such as diabetes and…

  • GIScience at GeOnG 2020

    These days so much is different- also conferences. Carolin Klonner and Marcel Reinmuth attended the GeOnG 2020 virtually. Thanks to the organizers! It worked well and there was great exchange between the participants. The workshop on experiences in defining health catchment areas brought together diverse stakeholders and approaches. Marcel Reinmuth contributed from the scientific open…

  • GIScience/HeiGIT at GeOnG Conference 2020

    Next week the biennial conference GeOnG will take place for the seventh time. On Monday and Tuesday 11/02-11/03 participants will join in over 30 live sessions around the topics of technology and information management in the humanitarian and development sector. This year’s theme is People at the heart of Information Management: promoting responsible and inclusive…

  • Mapping physical access to health care for older adults in sub-Saharan Africa and implications for the COVID-19 response: a cross-sectional analysis

    New paper published on healthcare access in Sub-Saharan Africa It is almost a year since SARS-CoV-2 first emerged in China. The virus spread all over the world. Countries south of the Sahara did not receive much attention. Although outbreaks here have a strong risk potential due to existing crises. In our new published paper we…

  • Exploring OSM for healthcare access analysis in Sub-Saharan Africa

    [tl;dr] Using hospital locations and the ORS Isochrone service, we have created a method for comparing physical access to healthcare in Sub-Saharan Africa. Hospital locations were derived from OpenStreetMap and compared against another free available dataset. Results indicate strong similarity in both hospital datasets, however the uncertainty of our method requires further evaluation. Figure 1…

  • Analysing OSM Completeness of health facilities in Sub-Sahara Africa in ohsomeHeX

    A new map in ohsomeHeX provides an overview of areas in Sub-Sahara Africa where information on health facilities is still missing in OpenStreetMap (OSM). The completeness of OSM is measured by comparing to a reference dataset on public health facilities in Sub-Sahara Africa, which was developed by Maina et al. 2019. Especially in these days,…