The need to provide better, personal health information and care at lower costs is opening the way to a number of digital solutions and applications designed and developed specifically for the healthcare. Various open-data initiatives are also making available an enourmous amount of diverse data that needs to be processed and, above all, understood. Under the Digital Health umbrella we find smartphone-based personal health applications, big data reduction and analysis tools, AI-based systems and health information support tools for professional and the industry. The aim of these applications is to help manage cronic conditions or improve ones lifestyle; provide doctors, hospitals and health-services with better, more efficient tools; improve policy makers decision making through the support of data analytics tools. GIS has always provided tools to better understand and contextualize data, this Special session on GIS and Healthcare will show how GIS techniques can be applied to the most common healthcare problems but also explore new areas where GIS can foster healthcare innovation.
The main topics include but are not limited to:
- GIS for disease control and forecast
- GIS for health resources optimization
- GIS for heralth emergency support systems
- Spatial analysis and data mining for healthcare data
- Big data analytics in healthcare
- Digital mapping and epidemiology