GISTelemed: An online-based GIS approach to epidemiological analysis in telemedicine systems

Large-scale telemedicine systems provide extensive amounts of data that can be used to gather epidemiological information. Epidemiologists have been using GIS systems for the easy and quick visualization of data and to perform georeferenced epidemiological analysis. This paper presents GISTelemed, a georeferenced epidemiological analysis tool developed as part of the Santa Catarina State Integrated Telemedicine and Telehealth System (STT/SC), a statewide telemedicine infrastructure in Brazil. The GISTelemed module offers an architecture supporting real-time recovery, information visualization and epidemiological analysis from structured and semi-structured data. The architecture uses controlled vocabularies for data catalogization and a specially developed ETL process that allows sending and receiving data on a large number of protocols, including DICOM SR and SQL. We performed a case study with users that indicates good perceived ease of use and usefulness of GISTelemed by both medical staff and health care managers.