8. GIS Initiatives in Health Care Planning

The geographical information system (GIS) is very helpful in a variety of application areas points to an increasing interest in the spatial aspects of health policies and planning. The main aim of this chapter is to examine the relevance of Geographical information system (GIS) supporting health planners for a district level healthcare planning. For this purpose, an effort has been made here to calculate the hospital requirement area to know the specific sector that needs to better develop health facilities. The weightage is assigned to the class of thematic layers respectively to produce weighted thematic maps, which have been overlaid and numerically added in order to produce a Hospital requirement index (HRI) and hospital requirement zone (HRZ) map. These maps are very useful to calculate the exact area having good health facilities and also those wherein healthcare facilities need to be improved in Varanasi district. When the outcomes are compared with Multiple Linear Regressions and Information Value method then it is found that the malaria model developed with Information Value method is an optimum model which is selected for the measurement of hospital requirement index using the related parameters. The Hospital requirement index (HRI) values according to the weighting method are found to lie in the range from 11 to 23. After calculation by weighting method using selected indicators, it is found that the areas coming under very high and high requirement class is 46.62 % and 7.55 %, respectively, whereas 3.39 % and 42.63 % of the total areas comes under low and moderate requirement classes in Varanasi district.