VESTRA has supported the California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD) in their efforts to develop a statewide enterprise GIS for healthcare quality policy analysis, allocation of funding resources, and monitoring of healthcare quality throughout the state. The public website provides healthcare facility patient data and statistics to healthcare professionals throughout the state, allowing them to better understand their individual service markets. For instance, patient data can be viewed by specific diagnosis grouping, to evaluate resource utilization.

The first step was the development and submittal of a Feasibility Study Report (FSR) for the creation of the enterprise GIS. VESTRA conducted interviews with all OSHPD divisions and programs and assessed the GIS potential for improving day-to-day workflow and providing technological alternatives to existing processes.

VESTRA was able to recommend a multi-year, phased implementation strategy for supporting a broad range of healthcare facilities and workforce information analysis needs. The implementation strategy covered all five major program areas within OSHPD. This FSR, which was the first statewide enterprise GIS plan to be submitted from the California Health and Human Services Agency, was reviewed and approved both by the California Department of Finance and the Department of Information Technology.

Once the FSR was approved, VESTRA was retained to provide technical and project management for a pilot enterprise GIS implementation. This included conducting technical workshops, assisting with system and network configuration, installation of data- and map-server hardware and software, development of prototype web GIS applications, and design of a geo-database model for licensed healthcare facilities. Due to the success of the enterprise GIS implementation, OSHPD's accomplishments were recognized by VESTRA at the International User Conference, where they were presented with a Special Achievement Award.

OSHPD expanded the Healthcare Atlas to include emergency departments and ambulatory services. The back office has been changed to incorporate data warehousing technology. VESTRA was subcontracted to re-engineer the applications to interface with the new data warehouse and dramatically expand the GIS user interface. The internal OSHPD website also will be fed live earthquake data (VESTRA currently is developing the site/data service integration), to assist OSHPD's Emergency Operations Center with providing support and regional coordination to hospitals affected by an earthquake.

VESTRA's other related project work included design and implementation of a centralized GIS data repository, development of a web-based GIS application framework for querying and reporting through OSHPD's Intranet, and technical support for the integration of GDT data projects. Technical support included creation of enterprise GIS web server best practices and maintenance documentation.