Open, Geo, Health Workshop: GIS in the NHS

I am leading a workshop at the Open, Geo Health Workshop in Edinburgh - #gecohealth. This is a JISC organised event.

I am hoping to encourage a discussion related to the future role of GIS in the health (NHS). As a researcher not only in usability I have a special interest in Health and Health inequalities.

It has long been my belief that GIS is under-utilised in the NHS. So whilst there are lots of new opportunities for Geo and Health - we need to identify what really needs to change to embed practice within the NHS. Whilst now more than ever before GIS is more affordable and more accessible with lots of useful data that can be applied to the health care setting - many barriers (social, political, technical, economical) still exist. The technical merits and low cost of Open Source Software are not enough to drive a georevolution within the NHS.

I see a number of the geospatial projects JISC have recently funded as having a future potential to aid decision-making in health. One of which is our project. Once the G3 project software is launched in October, I will develop a scenario around Geographic Concepts and health inequalities and hope that it will prove useful to health care professionals.

G3 a Few Months In

We’re now a few months in to the G3 project, and here’s the story so far:

- We’ve conducted and documented a number of in-depth interviews with members in our target groups of urban design, urban anthropology, history and environmental management.

- The interviews have been analysed, common themes and tasks identified, scenarios developed and then ‘translated’ into the language of GIS so that they can be implemented as teaching tools. We’re now looking at identifying data for each scenario.

- We’ve designed the end-to-end architecture of our scenario creation tool – this wasn’t as easy as a simple web site design, given that we want to build something extensible – i.e. that can grow as more scenarios are identified.

- We’ve set up our webserver, migrated a massive amount of existing reference code across, and started looking at the design of our scenarios from the end user perspective. We plan to use a step-by-step approach to allow our students to move through the learning process at their own page. The tool will validate that they understand the concepts as they go through.

- We’ve talked to a number of people involved in GIS teaching to identify how they approach introducing people from other disciplines to GIS.

So, we’d like to take the opportunity to say thanks to all the people who have participated in the project so far! We’ve promised most of you anonymity, but watch this space to see how your input has shaped the work.

Project Plan Post 5 of 7 - Project Team, Relationships and End-User Engagement

If you've been reading this blog so far, you've hopefully now got some ideas about the JISC G3 project (if not, please let us know!). So, the next post in this series is the 'who we are' post. However, a far more important issue before we get to that is 'who we hope you might be' - in other words, who makes up the community for the project?

There are two main communities for the project - firstly, a community of end users. You will typically be students, researchers or academics in departments such as archaeology, anthropology, computer science, health research or medicine, biology, environmental science and so forth. You will probably have used a web map (e.g. a Google Map) at some point, and may have heard of a Geographical Information System but think that the software is very complicated and that you can't use your data on a map. We hope that the tools developed by this project will give you some ideas about GIS and how you could use it, and make it less scary. We'd love to hear from you with any ideas as to how to do this and how you think you could use maps in your work.

The second community we hope to form is a group of GIS developers who can take our tools and add scenarios and expert information beyond the life of the project. These people will know what a GIS is, and also have web development and database skills. The will, perhaps, make use of the tools we develop for their own teaching, and will also add additional use cases and scenarios to the project.


And finally, who are we? We are a team of four people based at UCL and the University of Portsmouth. Our skills cover GIS, Human-Computer Interaction and Web Development and we are all involved in GIS teaching. In alphabetical order:

Claire Ellul used to be a GIS consultant and is now a Lecturer in GIS at UCL, specialising in spatial databases and web and mobile GIS. She was responsible for the technical development of the Community Maps project, and will oversee technical issues on JISCG3. Claire is Principal Investigator on the project.





Kate Jones is a Lecturer in Geography at the University of Portsmouth. She specialises in Usability in GIS and GIS and Health. Kate is responsbile for the development of the use-cases/scenarios, making sure we understand our users on the JISCG3 project. Kate is Co-investogator on the project.






Muki Haklay is a Senior Lecturer in GIS at UCL, specialising in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Usability in GIS as well as having extensive research expertise in Citizen Science and Community engagement. He will provide HCI expertise to the project.





Patrick Weber is a Research Fellow in GIS at UCL. He specialises in spatial and location-based analysis but also has extensive technical expertise with open source GIS, and will be responsible for the technical development of the JISCG3 project.

Project Plan Post 3 of 7 - Risk Analysis and Success of Plan

On one hand, this project is relatively low risk - we are dealing with technology (OpenLayers, a PostgreSQL/PostGIS database, Javascript, PHP, HTML) that we have already used extensively as a team, and working from a starting point of a previous project (Community Maps).

However, experience shows that the technology aspects of this project should set a few small alarm bells ringing - they are all open source, and this is risky in terms of available support and problem solving. Equally, we run the risk (as does any technology related development or teaching) of potential changes in versions requiring upgrades to our code (the upgrade of our Community Maps project due to a changing Google Maps API highlighted how extensive some of these version changes could be).

How to mitigate this risk - well, the relatively short time-span for this project (Feb - October 2011) allows us to select a version of each platform and stick to it. Beyond that, as we will be making extensive use of the tools in our own teaching, we will upgrade as and when required - documenting our code as we go along will help to facilitate this, as will opening the code up as a resource to the GIS community.

And other risks? We could discover, having talked to our user community, that GIS really isn't for them (or they're just not happy to engage in the project). We hope that this is unlikely - our users are members of interdisciplinary project teams which plan to make use of GIS - but we have identified fall-back scenarios in health epidemiology and coastal environment monitoring, just in case.

Project Plan Post 2 of 7 - Benefits to the Sector and Achievements for Host Institutions

The JISCG3 project provides us with a very useful the opportunity to gain an increased understanding of the mental models used by non-experts when engaging with GIS, which in turn will benefit our teaching and research activities. In fact, as part of the project, we are working with anthropologists, historians, geographers and environmental scientists - and they will provide a really important input when developing our scenarios and concetps.

We intend to make use of the JISCG3 tools during our teaching, and hope that colleagues will also do so - all the code will be published for reuse. As part of the project, we also hope to identify opportunities for further interdisciplinary research or teaching collaboration, as a result of the greater understanding of GIS gained by our expert users and equally of our greater understanding of their research domains.

Project Plan Post 1 of 7 - Aims, Objectives and Final Outputs

Most students and researchers are familiar with using maps on the internet or on a mobile phone – in particular, Google Maps - for tasks such as finding their way between A and B or finding the nearest cash machine or Italian restaurant. They can easily navigate around the map, and know that clicking on a point will pop-up some information.

What they maybe don’t realize, however, is that every time they do this, they are using a Geographical Information System (GIS). What’s more, a GIS could be a very useful tool for their studies and research as it provides a different way of looking at data –by putting data on a map, you can identify links, trends and patterns that aren’t obvious when you are looking at spreadsheets or databases.

The JISC G3 Project – Bridging the Gap between the GeoWeb and GIS – has been set up to overcome the disconnect between using GIS for day-to-day activities and as part of research or studies. We will develop a number of web-based tools to allow students to start with the familiar (panning and browsing a web map) and move towards more advanced GIS concepts. This will allow them to then make use of the more sophisticated GIS packages that are available to them (ArcGIS, MapInfo Professional, Geomedia Professional). Rather than teach abstract concepts, the tools will focus on scenarios related to discipline-specific use-cases, highlighting areas where GIS could be useful to individual groups.


The final output of the project will be a series of open-source tools and scenarios, which can then be added to by others as and when required.