Solution Used: Integration Kit for ESRI GIS

Challenges:

Geolocating Clients: The agency has a responsibility to the welfare and wellbeing of its clients. In the event of an emergency evacuation or interruption of essential services, it is imperative that they are able to quickly locate any of their clients who may be at risk in the affected area and offer assistance. In such a situation, quick and accurate response is of critical importance. For example, in the event a power outage is anticipated to last more than a couple of hours, there may be clients in their homes who could be at risk.

Determining the number and exact location of their clients in an affected area ("geolocating") was previously being done manually. The process was very tedious and lengthy, taking hours to accomplish. There was also the risk of human error, such that someone could be left unassisted if they were not able to track everyone.

Manually geolocating addresses also depended on reports that could be a week old or more in some situations. Any new vulnerable clients in the week since the report was run could be missed.

Client Load Balance: Client caseloads can vary in volume and distribution over geographic areas serviced by the health care agency. Trying to manually balance the numbers of clients in different boundaries required redrawing everyone's individual boundaries to attempt to achieve equal numbers of clients in each, which was very difficult and time consuming. The situation left many inefficiencies and the potential for imbalance in staff work levels.

Solution:

The APOS Integration Kit for ESRI GIS provided the agency with "location intelligence": bridging data from their SAP BusinessObjects system with their ESRI GIS system. Two new applications were developed to integrate these technology platforms: the GIS Client Locator application (GCL) and the GIS Caseload Assignment application (GCA). Bringing together the business intelligence system and GIS system, the Integration Kit for ESRI GIS helped the agency leverage their business intelligence system to provide security and broad availability across the organization, while utilizing critical GIS data and client data from both systems.

GIS Client Locator Application (GCL): The area served by the health care agency is geographically diverse. In use under emergency evacuation conditions, the GCL application accurately locates clients in a specific geographic area, and provides details of their health status and vulnerability. The GCL application provides this crucial location intelligence data to them, taking a complex process, and making it simple and accessible to immediately locate all clients, at all times, across a number of their branch offices. The agency can now access and provide crucial live data in an emergency situation in less than 30 minutes, and safeguard their clients' wellbeing.

When a bomb scare triggered an emergency evacuation, the GCL application enabled the agency to quickly locate all of their clients who were residing in the affected area. If necessary, the agency would have been able to notify police with details of any high risk clients, to assist the first responders going door to door evacuating residents. There are situations where clients might depend on electrical devices, for example devices to assist with breathing, clients who are deaf and would not hear the police knocking, or clients with mobility problems.

(click image to enlarge) GIS Client Locator application (GCL) plots clients geographically.	(click image to enlarge) GIS Client Locator connects geographic data with client details pertinent to an emergency situation. Data can then be exported to multiple formats.

GIS Caseload Assignment Application (GCA): The GCA application is being used across all seven branches of the agency to balance caseload among managers. This function has become important to case managers and makes case assignment quite effortless. Morale has been raised as the system ensures caseloads are balanced. Using the GCA application, the agency now uses much larger geographic areas with multiple case managers sharing responsibility for those boundaries, equally distributing cases among those case managers. As a new client is added to the system, the GCA application determines within which boundary its address falls. With a click of the pin, a report which has pulled data from the live SAP BusinessObjects system shows the current caseloads for the case managers responsible for that area, and indicates who has the lowest caseload at the top of the list.

(click image to enlarge) The GIS Caseload Assignment Application (GCA) geolocates new clients and determines the most appropriate case manager for the assignment based on current caseload.

Why APOS?

It is crucial for the agency to access live SAP BusinessObjects data through their ESRI GIS system. The only way for them to accomplish what they needed was to use the APOS Integration Kit for ESRI GIS.

The agency is finding the GIS Client Locator application beneficial beyond emergency situations. The APOS Selection Control shows multiple types of reports that can be run off of a selected set of clients. When anyone uses the application with one of the selection controls, they can choose from a list of reports that are appropriate to their situation. The buffer tool allows staff to click on a hospital and find out how many of their clients are within a certain radius of that hospital, which helps them understand patient flow, which of those patients came to them from that hospital, and within what distance from the hospital they were. They can also now easily find out whether long term care homes are serving their immediate community, or if their clients are coming from long distances to be in that home.

ESRI implementation services for the agency's solution were provided by Infonaut Inc., a Toronto-based ESRI business partner focused on system planning, informatics services and the delivery of web-based location-based business intelligence solutions for the healthcare sector. Infonaut's industry knowledge was instrumental in the development and deployment of the ESRI ArcGIS Server component and map-based content required by the agency. Matt McPherson, COO of Infonaut, explained, "The integration of map-based content with business intelligence content is a significant trend that we are seeing throughout the market. Our work with the APOS solution at the health care agency has amplified the importance of this integration, revealing many potential benefits for our customer base. The APOS solution greatly simplifies the level of effort required for this type of integration, and unlocks very compelling intelligence."

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