Implementation of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) in Health Care

Dear Colleagues,

Understanding spatial patterns of phenomena that occur in geographic space can offer crucial insights for them that are unlikely to be discovered with non-spatial data analyses. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is a well adopted instrument to explore and examine such spatial patterns in disciplines that benefit from investigating spatial patterns of their subjects, such as health geography and spatial epidemiology. However, GIS often has been limited in health care applications, for example, to data preparation, spatial pattern and clustering description, spatial autocorrelation measurement, and spatial accessibility measurement.

This Special Issue aims to publish research papers that contribute to extending the utility of GIS in health care and/or public health research. Specifically, this Special Issue encourages researchers to submit papers that present novel GIS applications to investigate and enhance research on health care system and related public health issues. In addition, it welcomes research outcomes that present methodological innovations in Geographic Information Sciences (GISc) that advances the investigation of health care and public health issues from a new perspective.

Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Location modeling of health care and health care systems;
• Spatial accessibility to health care;
• Health care spatial analytics;
• Health disparities;
• Health services planning;
• Emergency response;
• Public health surveillance;
• Environmental risk factors for health care and public health;
• Personal sensing techniques for risk factors;
• Spatial health big data analysis;
• Machine learning and deep learning approaches for health care analysis;
• Novel GIS applications for health care and public health.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Yongwan Chun
Prof. Dr. Daniel A. Griffith
Dr. Amy E. Hughes
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Healthcare is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2700 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.