Where health care professionals practice can have a significant impact on access to care. Understanding those geographic patterns, and how they relate to population characteristics, health outcomes, facilities, and other factors, can help policymakers and health care organizations identify communities where additional resources may be needed.
Blue Raster worked with HealthLandscape to develop the American Medical Association (AMA) Health Workforce Mapper, an interactive mapping application designed to help users explore the geographic distribution of the health care workforce across the United States.
Turning Health Workforce Data into Actionable Maps
The AMA Health Workforce Mapper brings together health workforce information with demographic, health, and geographic data in an intuitive mapping environment. Users can explore physician and non-physician health care professionals by specialty and employment setting and examine patterns at the state, county, and metropolitan-area levels.
The application also allows users to view hospitals, rural health clinics, health professional shortage areas, and other health care facilities alongside contextual geographic information. Additional patient health data helps users better understand how workforce availability intersects with health outcomes, health behaviors, social conditions, and access to care
By bringing these datasets together geographically, the application helps users identify potential areas of workforce need as well as areas of overlap. These insights can support workforce planning, policy discussions, advocacy, and strategies designed to improve patient access to care.
Built on the ArcGIS Platform
Blue Raster developed the fully custom mapping application on behalf of HealthLandscape using ArcGIS Online and the ArcGIS Maps SDK for JavaScript. The solution combines the data management and mapping capabilities of the ArcGIS platform with a custom user experience designed specifically around health workforce exploration.
The application demonstrates the value of combining authoritative health data with modern web GIS technology. Rather than requiring users to work across multiple datasets and systems, the mapper provides a single interactive environment where users can visualize patterns, compare locations, turn layers on and off, and explore the relationships between the health workforce and the communities it serves.
The result is a powerful example of how custom applications built on ArcGIS can make complex health data easier to understand and use.
Supporting Evidence-Based Health Workforce Planning
The AMA Health Workforce Mapper is designed to help policymakers, researchers, health organizations, and advocates better understand where health professionals are practicing and where additional workforce capacity may be needed.
For example, users can examine the availability of particular medical specialties, compare workforce patterns with population and patient health characteristics, and identify communities that may benefit from expanded access to health care professionals. These visualizations can help communicate complex workforce challenges to policymakers and other stakeholders in a clear and compelling way.
The AMA also provides members with enhanced capabilities, including the ability to export customizable workforce and demographic information for additional analysis.
Explore the AMA Health Workforce Mapper
Click on the App below
A Continued Collaboration with HealthLandscape
Blue Raster is proud to support HealthLandscape in developing geospatial tools that make complex health information more accessible and actionable. The AMA Health Workforce Mapper builds on HealthLandscape's extensive experience using geographic data visualization to improve understanding of health care access and community needs.
Projects like the Health Workforce Mapper demonstrate how thoughtfully designed GIS applications can move beyond simply displaying data on a map. By bringing workforce, demographic, facility, and health information together, these tools can reveal patterns and relationships that support better planning and more informed decisions.
Interested in building a custom GIS application that makes complex data accessible and actionable? Contact us today.