Why Health Services Research Needs Geoinformatics: Rationale and Case Example

Delivery of health care in the United States has become increasingly complex over the past 50 years, as health care markets have evolved, technology has diffused, population demographics have shifted, and cultural expectations of health and health care have been transformed. Identifying and understanding important patterns of health care services, accessibility, utilization, and outcomes can best be accomplished by combining data from all of these dimensions in near-real time. The Big Data paradigm provides a new framework to bring together very large volumes of data from a variety of sources and formats, with computing capacity to derive new information, hypotheses, and inferences [1,2]. The complementary fields of genomics and bioinformatics have already made great advances only made possible by Big Data approaches. Similar gains can be made by pairing health services research with geoinformatics –- defined as “the science and technology dealing with the structure and character of spatial information, its capture, its classification and qualification, its storage, processing, portrayal and dissemination, including the infrastructure necessary to secure optimal use of this information” [3]. Integrating geospatial technologies with health services research brings informatics approaches, data sciences, and spatial theories of health and healthcare together to explore relationships among geography, health, and delivery of care in novel ways made possible through geoinformatics. synergy between the two disciplines will enhance our ability to discover how health care is delivered most effectively for the greatest health benefits across populations.