USING OPEN SOURCE TO CREATE A GEOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION SYSTEM FOR BLOOD DONATIONS

The increasing development of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) paradigm has brought a reduction in the cost of software development and increased its speed, resulting in quality improvement and constant evolution. Examples of applications that greatly enhance this area are geographic information systems (GIS). They permit the allocation of raw data or processed information in a map, allowing contextualization of the information itself and knowledge extrapolation. The transfusion medicine is an excellent area of health in which one can use a GIS to display the geographic distribution of blood donors on the map. A FLOSS GIS is feasible in this context thus reducing the high governmental costs in Health Care Area. The information can be easily displayed without copyrights and other complications. For these reasons, we decided to develop a platform that allows the display of information relative to the blood donations. Our goals focused on: researching the state of the art off current status; data manipulation and processing of the donor's database; and modelling and developing a program that could show a varied option of queries that can be done to the database. We used some statistic approach to the data as well as software implementation. After its completion, it was possible to calculate the distribution of blood donors and cross reference this with the places of collect. The distribution of the donors by group or area was made visible for interpretation purposes. Ultimately, the feasibility of such systems is proved and the changes in blood donation management can represent an important improvement towards good care.