HealthLandscape

1. HealthLandscape A User Guide

2. What is HealthLandscape? • HealthLandscape is an interactive web atlas that allows health professionals, policy makers, academic researchers and planners to combine, analyze and display information in ways that promote understanding and improvement of health and healthcare. • HealthLandscape is a tool that brings together varied sources of health-related information to answer your questions about health and healthcare.

3. What can HealthLandscape do? • HealthLandscape can • Create maps • About health in your community • About your clinic population or the neighborhood that you serve • About your residency program • About relationships between your program or clinic and legislators • View tables • Discover • if your clinic is in an area potentially eligible for Medicare bonus payment • is in a designated underserved area • community characteristics around your clinic • Save and print your maps and tables to share with patients, payors, and policy-makers • Upload your own data for mapping

4. Who will use HealthLandscape? • This tool will appeal to • Healthcare providers • Academics & residency training programs • Policy-makers, advocates and community leaders • Individuals interested in health • Data holders seeking to map their information

5. Getting Started • In order to use HealthLandscape, you must have Internet Explorer 6 or higher. In order to print maps from HealthLandscape, you must have the free Adobe Reader installed on your computer. To upload data, Adobe Flash Player, version 9.0 should be installed • These are all available free of charge at the Microsoft and Adobe websites

6. The Homepage

7. Logging In

8. Creating a Profile

9. Making a map within HealthLandscape • Let’s explore HealthLandscape through an example of one user seeking to answer a particular question…

10. The Case • Pretend you are a primary care advocate working in the state of Georgia visiting the site with two goals in mind: • To demonstrate the value of Primary Care, and Family Medicine especially, to health and access to health for patients in Georgia • To advocate for an increase in funding for Family Medicine and Primary Care Residency Programs

11. This user might want to make the following maps: • Map One: Health Professional Shortage Areas • Map Two: Residency Footprinting • Map Three: Physician Specialty Distribution • Map Four: Mapping Populations of Interest

12. From the Homepage, you would click “Primary Care Atlas”

13. Understanding Health Professional Shortage Areas (HPSAs) • What is a HPSA? • Health Professional Shortage Areas (HPSAs) are counties or portions of counties in the United States that have the lowest ratio of physicians to population. Without primary care physicians, the number of HPSAs would increase dramatically. Additionally, Medicare pays a 10 percent bonus to physicians who deliver services in HPSAs. • How can you use the HPSA mapping tool? • This mapping engine allows you to map HPSAs in your area, see the impact that removing primary care physicians would have on the creation of new HPSAs, and determine whether your practice is eligible for HPSA bonus payments.

14. To make Map One, click here

15. This takes you to the HPSA wizard, where you click the following…

16. To produce this map of Georgia Primary Care HPSAs. Then click… Health Professional Shortage Areas by county in Georgia

17. To show the Impact of FP/GP Removal, or click… HPSAs by county in Georgia if Family Medicine and General Practice Physicians are removed

18. To show the Impact of Removing All other Primary Care Specialties on HPSAs HPSAs by county in Georgia if Peds, GIM, OB/GYN and Med-Peds Physicians are removed

19. Other mapmaking wizards work similarly • Help features for each are currently under development!

20. Some common tools found on HealthLandscape • You’ll see these on every mapmaker page…

21. Common Tools Allows user to view a smaller area with more detail. Click on the map, and drag the mouse diagonally to create a box around the area of interest. Release the mouse and a new map with more detail will load. Opposite of zoom in, allows a user to map a larger area with less detail. Click the point on the map to be centered after the new map is rendered. For example, zooming out of a map of a county shows the surrounding state and region. Allows user to drag the map in any direction to center it on a new area. Clicking on the map and dragging will slide the existing map to the desired position. Returns map to the maximum extent of data available. This is often the initial extent. Creates a printer ready document including the map and legend. This format is better suited for printer widths. Resets the visible layers to the default settings. Also used to clear highlighted features and text from the map.

22. Common Tool Helpful wizards to quickly create common maps. Detailed explanation and instructions for each Map Wizard. Displays layer selection list on the right side of the screen. Users can turn on and turn off layers by clicking the checkbox next to each layer. Displays complete legend on the right side of the screen. Directions for using this mapping tool. Wizard for exporting data in various formats. Allows identification of map features. It is used to provide additional information available from a geospatial database. In some cases you must click on the feature of interest and in other cases you may drag a box to select multiple features. Allows querying and filtering of data attributes. Allows selecting individual features on the map for exporting data.

23. And remember • Maps are only as good as the data that they reflect… • We make our best efforts to use the best data available, but all data has its shortcomings and limitations… • Interpret and explain the maps you make with caution!