Our June meeting of Health TechNet was held on Friday, June 22 at Nelson Mullins’ offices in Washington, D.C.
The feature topic was new developments and analytical capabilities in geospatial analysis of healthcare. All health care is local and it varies significantly from region to region and even from neighborhood to neighborhood. Geospatial analysis looks at differences based on where things happen. To steer our discussion of these issues, we had two primary speakers: 1) Lloyd Brodsky of Optum, and 2) Ajay Gupta of Health Solutions Research (see below for biographical information).
Over the past ten years, it has become vastly easier to do basic geospatial analysis. Basic geospatial capabilities have been built into such consumer-friendly tools as Excel and Tableau, while more advanced capabilities are freely available in R and QGis. In addition, a range of government agencies and non-governmental agencies have established very useful public-facing websites for both displaying their own geospatial analysis and to distribute their data for public use. Dr. Brodsky showed how to use a spreadsheet for geospatial analysis and demonstrated some of the most useful health-related geospatial data sites. (See the attached “heat map” as an example.)
Health Solutions Research has developed a geospatial health data analytic platform, called the GeoHealth Dashboard, and Ajay Gupta demonstrated some of the projects that they have done, including Health System Capacity Analysis, Rural Healthcare, Medical Transportation, as well as addressing the Opioid Epidemic.
Lloyd Brodsky is a solution architect with Optum Government Solutions where he works with data warehouses supporting state Medicaid programs. Dr. Brodsky has a PhD in health management from the Sloan School of MIT. Ajay Gupta leads Health Solutions Research, Inc., (HSR) non-profit dedicated to researching and working with health systems to implement solutions to advance the state of medical care in the country. Ajay has an MBA from Georgetown University as well as MSEE and BSEE degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Maryland College Park.