Special Achievement in GIS
 

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South Carolina Department of Health and Environment, Division of Biostatistics and Health GIS

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Our Agency is constantly working to embed GIS technologies into daily activities to improve response times for data requests and to aid decision-making by framing issues in a spatial context.

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Business Problem

The Division of Biostatistics and Health GIS, a subset of the Public Health Statistics and Information Services Program area within and The South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control, has a substantial amount of geographically based public health and emergency management information that needed to be accessible to a very diverse internal and external audience ranging from concerned citizens and health care workers to University researchers and Emergency Response agencies. This audience has a wide range of technical capabilities and a diverse set of needs. With limited resources the agency had to determine the most appropriate way to leverage this information to allow access in a spatial manner that accommodated this diverse audience while aiding the daily decision making process in public health assessment and surveillance. Different levels of access to this information had to be available with ample security measures in place. Additionally, this data resides in varied formats on multiple servers running different platforms and relational database management systems that had to all be integrated and accessible through a variety of different end users applications. Once the data had been integrated there also had to be a mechanism in place to keep it current and well documented.

Technology Implemented

To address these issues the Division has employed a diverse set of GIS technology from ESRI to integrate and leverage this information to the widest audience possible through interactive Internet map services, linked relational database management systems, and a strict set of data quality assurance and quality control measures. The Division has utilized ArcIMS, ASP, .NET, ArcSDE, SQL Server, ArcGIS, and various ESRI software extensions ranging from RouteMap IMS to StreetMap 2000 to enable its Enterprise GIS. By employing RDBMS capabilities coupled with ArcSDE and ArcIMS procedures have been developed to keep GIS layers accessible, current, and well documented.

Development Team Biography

Informatics Manager
Jared Shoultz has a M.A. in Geography/GIS and has worked for Biostatistics for 2 years managing projects and technical aspects of their Public Health GIS program.

Statistician III
Petko Kostadinov has a M.S. in statistics and deals with statistical aspects of SCAN.

GIS Analyst
Angela Kneece has worked for Biostatistics for 2 years working on cartography and data QA/QC.

GIS/IT Systems Administrator
John Sanders has worked for Biostatistics for 7 years managing and troubleshooting network and hardware issues.

GIS Analyst
Mehdi Khan had a GIS focus in his M.S. program and is currently managing Biostatistics’ web-based GIS program.
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