A GIS-based decision support system for locating primary care facilities

Abstract

Keeping up a high level of primary care services for a whole country or even a federal state is a very challenging task due to the demographic change and many other reasons, also for Germany. In the future it is expected that even more general practitioners (GP) are necessary to cover close to come healthcare. Therefore, an efficient use of resources and an optimized planning is crucial. Mathematical models and approaches can help facing the challenge by determining optimal locations for practices, shift schedules or appointment strategies, for example. To use these in practice, decision support systems (DSS) are necessary that link the input data to the approaches and display the results. The outline of such a decision support system for optimally locating GP practices is presented in this paper.