Urban Health Atlas: A geospatial data visualization tool for evidence based decision making in urban areas of Bangladesh

Background: The unregulated proliferation of the urban private health care sector in LMICs like Bangladesh is a serious policy concern. More rational planning, however, requires systematic methods of documenting and analyzing... [ view full abstract ]

Background:
The unregulated proliferation of the urban private health care sector in LMICs like Bangladesh is a serious policy concern. More rational planning, however, requires systematic methods of documenting and analyzing facility service information, as per WHO’s recommendation for the creation of a Master Facility List. Given growing geographic and socioeconomic inequities in urban health, there is a critical need for tools that facilitate evidence-based planning for effective coverage of urban health services.
Objective:
Using health facility data from five city corporations in Bangladesh, we developed a web-based interactive data visualization tool with GIS functionality named the Urban Health Atlas (UHA). This user-friendly tool has various applications related to health service planning, referral and regulation, with specialized functions for policy makers, providers and the general public.
Methods:
The UHA is architecturally segmented into three tiers: (i) a presentation tier arrays data in a visual and quantifiable manner using Javascript, HTML and CSS; (ii) a middle tier which refers to the business logic or algorithm (iii) a database tier provides access to the actual data base management system (DBMS) using PHP and MySql, and contains detailed facility information including GPS coordinates, road networks, administrative boundaries and population census data.
Results:
The outputs of UHA are map, data and chart views, Choropleth maps, shortest path calculations, service area calculations based on road networks, dynamic filter options, optimized searching capacity, clustering and classification. UHA also permits different levels of access for data entry, update and verification.
Conclusions/Implications:
The UHA provides a comprehensive, spatio-temporal health information infrastructure for urban areas that complements the national health information system. It can also function as a web-based platform for other geo-spatial data visualization applications such as disease and vulnerability mapping in resource-constraint countries.