GIS Open Source Application as a Support to a Hospital Morbidity Database Hospital GIS

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) capabilities are increasing in health area. GIS have been used to investigate global health studies due to the huge capabilities to manipulation, storage, management, analysis, modelling and mapping of geographical data. A simple and intuitive graphic interface to represent spatially an administrative database information would be a great usefulness to the health community. In this work, an open source application was developed in Python language under a GIS open source software (QGIS). The application, incorporated in GIS software, is composed by two tabs: Symbology and Mapping. In order to test the developed application, a zone from Porto Metropolitan Area and a database with administrative data, hospital morbidity database, was considered. This data was previously added to PostGIS (an open source database) and automatically connected to the application. The difficulty of health professionals in the creation of multiple visualizations of tabular data defined by rigorous position, and the maps creation to later analysis and printing, can be overcome with this application. The large amount of data requires the connection to a free database in GIS environment enhancing the practical applicability, rapid, safe and efficient data representation.