Karnataka is one of the pioneer states in the country for delivering Comprehensive Public Health Services to its Citizens. Even before the concept of Primary Health Centres was conceived by the Government of India, the State had made a beginning in establishing a number of Primary Health Units(PHUs) for providing comprehensive health care, and a delivery system consisting of curative, preventive, promotive and rehabilitation health care to the people of the state. "HEALTH" is a fundamental right of every citizen. The Department of Health and Family Welfare is committed to improve the health services by meeting the health needs and expectations of the people of Karnataka. With this clear vision, continuing the tradition of innovation and being the leaders in providing the best of public health care, the department initiated GIS based Planning, Monitoring and management of its various programs, assets and resources through a web based Health GIS Portal developed in collaboration with Karnataka State Remote Sensing Application Centre (KSRSAC), Government of Karnataka. It is expected that integrating the geospatial data of Health assets with its attribute database such as infrastructure, human resource, budget etc may help in efficient administration of ongoing Health Programmes. Towards this, "Health GIS – A Geospatial Solution for Health", a decision making and management tool is established in association with KSRSAC, Department of innovation and Technologies – as part of its Karnataka GIS (K-GIS) program.

Geographic Information System (GIS) ?

Geographic Information System (GIS) is a system of hardware, software and procedures designed to support the capture, management, store, analysis, modelling and display of spatially referenced data for solving complex planning and management problems. Geographic Information System (GIS) stores information about the world as a collection of various layers (ex: demography, administrative boundary, hospital and health facilities of governmentt and private owned, other infrastructure and assets etc) that can be linked together by geography.

Health GIS?

“Health GIS” is the utilization of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) for a better Health Care.

GIS acts as a powerful tool in the decision making process. It plays an important role in the visualization of patient geographic health data, identifying health trends/risks, tracking and prediction of diseases, resource management, delivering improved health Services to public and health emergency management. GIS is capable of answering location based queries and can combine different layers to form new information. Currently, the following information is available in Health GIS portal. The contents and applications are constantly being updated to provide need based spatial visualization and statistics.

• Geo-tagged Health assets
• A Dashboard to visualize statistics, generate reports and compose maps of user choice.
• Decision Support System for Health governanc.e
• Citizen applications and web-interface.