H04 – Geo-View – Innovating Virtual Care to Make Visible Dependency Ratios, Diversity inclusion and Social Determinants of Health

Summary

In Canada and USA, the pandemic led to the rapid launch and support for virtual care. The pandemic also made visible how the lack of recognition of the social determinants of health in the health care system at large has led to the uneven distribution of severe health outcomes in both countries. Virtual care has increased access for patients but it cannot address the inequity within populations of citizens in both countries. A family doctor and students from the Faculty of Industrial Engineers at Dalhousie University teamed up to create a novel approach to address theses problems. We have created “Geo-view” which offers three ways to make visible barriers to access, unbalanced referral patterns for health services across geography , diversity and social determinants of health within provinces/states and within a health care providers practice. Our mapping of dependency , identified as an unrecognized tsunami heading for us, is visualized for the first time in our work. This Geographical Information system based tool can be easily embedded within Electronic medical records and Hospital Information Systems to visualize at risk patients and populations. It will help recognize and respond proactively to at risk patients that have hitherto been invisible at the point care.