Spatial information is an inherent aspect of delivering social services to communities throughout the world. GIS technology facilitates social service planning by enabling social service professionals to define trends, support public policy decisions, plan logical service delivery strategies for imperative human services, and conduct other activities that bring aid and support to society. By combining GIS with other types of traditional methods for data analysis, social services can be delivered with more complete knowledge of a situation, yielding more effective results.

Health care professionals, social workers, and others in the industry rely on GIS technology as a decision support tool and to further understand relationships between people and geographic location. With better understanding of spatial characteristics, professionals can understand problems and formulate a response, improving both their ability to increase their presence in areas of greatest need and their ability to improve the services they already have in place.

Accurate and detailed spatial data also helps social service professionals conduct marketing-type analysis, which helps document particular service needs of clients and leads to better allocated resources. This is vital to most social service organizations, as they provide services to a vast arena, often with limited funding. With GIS, service organizations can analyze drive times to find optimal routes, analyze market share by service type, conduct site analysis to find the best locations for services, evaluate the market areas of competing services, and conduct many other internal and external studies that lead to improved services. The stories in this section reflect the benefits GIS technology brings to the social service sector.

For more information on GIS and health and human services, visit www.esri.com/health.