IV Murali Krishna Director, R&D, Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University,
Hyderabad
G Devendra Rao Infotech Enterprises Limited,
Hyderabad
Greater Hyderabad has the highest population growth in India. With infrastructural and Information Technology (IT) growth, the city is flooded with expats from across the country. These people do not know the availability of public health service centres (PHC) in the city. This article presents an application to monitor PHC network across Hyderabad facilitating information and accessibility routes to the user.
1.0 Introduction
In a country like India, with its vast size, varied topography and diverse culture, gathering health data of the swelling populace manually by going from hospital to hospital is a Herculean task [1]. Spatial information technology (SIT) and GPS [2, 3] make life easier as the data is converted to digital format, maps on different aspects are then made and based on individual needs integrated and analysed. This makes it an indispensable tool for health experts allowing them to track down PHCs in an area and zero in on the exact position of the PHC [1].
Access to PHC is one of the indexes to achieve the goal of “health for all” (World Health Organisation and UNICEF 1978) [4]. There are many barriers to access these PHCs. They differ from country to country and time to time. These barriers are [5]:
The last three types (3, 4 and 5 above) are known as non-spatial barriers and reveal socio-economic factors while the first two (1 and 2 above) are generally spatial in nature. Availability in the context of PHC refers to the number of health care service points, which people in emergency can choose. Accessibility [6] refers to the distance between residential or demand areas and PHC services or destinations. It also refers to the time required to transfer a patient to the nearest PHC. In this research, availability and accessibility are considered as “spatial accessibility” [7] and the aim is to identify and locate the PHC as early as possible.
In this research, an application is designed [8, 9] and developed with the help of GPS data to locate all the hospitals across Hyderabad and their shortest accessibility. This spatial software application can be put to use from desktop applications to web-based applications. These spatial applications are used to determine the location and shortest route of PHC [6] in any locality in case of emergency services.
2.0 Methodology 2.1 Study Area
In this research, we chose the Hyderabad City region (Figure 1) [10] of Andhra Pradesh, India, as the testing area. The population and the area of Hyderabad are 6.1 million and 624 square km respectively [11]. There are many renowned hospitals and PHCs across the city. This software application will help common people get easy accessibility of these PHCs.
2.2 System Development
A system is designed and developed for Greater Hyderabad Public Health-Service Centre accessibility. The system has been named as “Greater Hyderabad PHC”. The detail requirement and flow diagram, database design and screen layouts are described here.
2.2.1 Requirement
User logs in the PHC system have the facility to search for the PHC in the form hospital name and area wise. The search result shows the details of PHCs in terms of specialisation and possible route to access the selected PHC. User also can find the shortest route among all possible accessibility. The report will have the print function to carry along with the user while travelling.
2.2.2 Implementation technology
An application has been developed with the above idea by using technologies like Visual C++/Visual Basic, ArcView, Google Earth, Microsoft Access and Windows.
Visual C++ /Visual Basic are good to handle the spatial objects for PHC application development. A user can load this application in his personal system or all the administrative system across the organisation. These languages are well equipped to handle the spatial objects compared to procedural languages.
Google Earth has been used to generate the PHC coordinates along with GPS data. This may not be accurate coordinate but it gives a clear idea about the area across the city.
ArcView is desktop Geographic Information System (GIS) software that provides geographic data visualisation, mapping, management, and analysis capabilities along with the ability to create and edit the data. With ArcView, you can create intelligent, dynamic maps using data from a wide range of sources. ArcView includes tools and data one can use immediately to perform state-of-the-art GIS analysis and map creation. Using ArcView, one can understand the geographic context of data, allowing one to see relationships and identify patterns in new ways. Most data has a geographical component that can be tied to a place: an address, postal code, global positioning system location, census block, city, region, country or other location. ArcView allows one to visualise, explore and analyse geographical data, revealing patterns, relationships and trends that are not readily apparent in databases, spreadsheets or statistical packages. Microsoft Access is used to create databases to run the application. We can use Oracle database for better performance. Greater Hyderabad PHC applications are developed for Windows operating system.
