Spatial data visualization in healthcare: supporting a facility location decision via GIS-based market analysis

As the business of healthcare continues to evolve, it is increasingly important for hospital systems to optimize the quality of capital investment decisions. Since proximity to services plays a major role in an individual's choice of healthcare provider, decisions concerning facility location and function are crucial. The paper describes an application of spatial data visualization to support the decisions of locating and sizing a proposed Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) within a system's network of rural hospitals. A geographic information system (GIS) was used to analyze publicly available and system-specific data. The discovered patterns of healthcare system market share and customer travel were key drivers in the decision-making process. The application provides a good example of using a spatial data mining tool as a powerful step in the knowledge discovery in databases (KDD) process.