Five Benefits of GIS for Healthcare Providers

Are you using the power of geoinformation in your medical practice or healthcare services business?

Geography matters, especially in the modern hyper-connected world where the rise of consumer information sharing can make or break a service practitioner’s reputation in a market.

Meanwhile patients increasingly expect convenience, value and efficiency when using their time. They are savvier than ever before about shopping and competition for their attention and shopping dollars is fierce. 

Don’t worry, we have a prescription that can help, it’s called GIS!

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and location intelligence data software can produce highly visual, highly useful data driven maps of a region, city, neighborhood, market or even inside a building such as a hospital or on a campus, filled with information and insights that can enable users to gain an immediately valuable and highly competitive advantage in their endeavors.

Placing the business data you probably already collect on a map and augmenting it with other publicly and privately available data is not only key to thoroughly understanding and visualizing your market, but also capitalizing on it. 

Don’t worry, we know about HIPAA and rest assured, as GIS systems can comply or simply use data that avoids crossover into the protected data space and still be very useful.

Let’s take a closer look at five ways GIS mapping benefits healthcare providers and related businesses:

1. Selecting Locations For Success

The wrong location can greatly impact your success, no matter how compelling, useful and valuable your product or service might be. 

GIS mapping and location intelligence can help determine what type of site is right for a new location to better optimize the choice for maximized potential.

Mapping and evaluating for site selection involves considering many factors that will help drive sales, from consumer demand and traffic patterns to local populations and much more. 

A market mapping tool gives healthcare providers the power to store, quantify, visualize, and manage site data in order to avoid a potentially poor location.

2. Identify Your Competition

Data is knowledge and knowledge is power. GIS software provides access to competitive information in a concise and useful visual map based format. 

With GIS, Practices can understand exactly where competitors are in relation to their own facilities and what local factors in that specific area are affecting the outcomes of the locations.

Competition mapping with GIS moves beyond the spreadsheet and offers a visual representation of nearby competitors, the products and services they offer, their hours of operation, marketing tactics, and in many cases, so much more.

GIS gives a clear, visual understanding and helps you decide on a course of action based on what is happening in your target market, providing insights that can drive product development, promotions, and customer loyalty in the face of ever increasing competition. 

3. Find Profitable Customer Demographics

To make the most of GIS mapping capabilities, decision makers first need basic customer information, like age groups or gender.

While specific customer information may work for retailers to send you the most relatable catalogs, this may not be HIPAA compliant for healthcare providers. Aggregate information that is not personally identifiable can be used and often provides a lot of value in decision making compared to working without any solid information. Most practices collect at least some or all of this information already in the course of every day business. 

Understanding your patient’s needs and their facility selection criteria and reasons for their choice of locations is crucial to increasing profitability and launching new strategies. 

GIS can link this commonly collected data to geographic information using GIS mapping. Not only will you be able to draw insights from location-based demographic data, but also plot profitable patient groups by community such as children in the starter home part of town or the elderly in the more retirement oriented areas. Then you can plan your marketing and patient acquisition processes accordingly, as well as choosing convenient locations and hours by neighborhood or regional area.

4. Manage Service Routes & Field Personnel

A powerful tool for optimizing and managing deliveries, and field personnel such as remote care providers, home visit providers, sales reps, service techs and mobile inventory management, GIS can help optimize any appointments, scheduled service requests, arrival and departure times, customer site visits, fuel use, routes and route efficiencies and many other facets of operations.

Bring complex data to life with mapping analysis, and connect the dots for service based field processes.

5. Launch Targeted Marketing Campaigns

Healthcare providers who leverage GIS can generate multi-dimensional representations and views of patient preferences, dislikes and purchasing trends. 

Analyzing patterns in your market is an essential step in communicating with patients through effective marketing. 

Using geospatial analytics in healthcare allows you to plan effective and accurate marketing personas and refine strategies, better target with new and social media audiences, and launch much more effective and optimized direct mail campaigns.

Mapping software reveals a world of vital information to providers, from demographic profiles to nearby competitors, and more. 

By visualizing information with GIS mapping, healthcare professionals can better interpret data, improve decision making, and enhance communications. Learn more about GIS mapping and how you can leverage it for your own business.

Let’s have a conversation

We would love to learn about your business goals and hurdles and share some insights and pointers we’ve learned along the way about GIS options, tools and best practices. Let us show you some of the ways we’ve helped other companies get where they want to go, and chat about what we can achieve together for your company, with no obligation required.

CyberSWIFT, LLC Copyright 2019