GIS Career Opportunities for Healthcare IT Pros

The growing sophistication of geographic information systems (GIS) and mapping provides IT pros with a significant opportunity to specialize in an increasingly in-demand set of skills, particularly in the health arena. GIS allows businesses and organizations to visualize, analyze, interpret and present complex geo-location data.

While not new—you’ll see a mid-19^th century health example of GIS in action below, in fact—healthcare organizations are increasingly relying on these technologies to map sickness and disease trends around the world.  For example, the World Health Organization leverages GIS technology to map the spread and frequency of the influenza virus, while Health-mapping.com maintains continuously updated and data-crammed maps reporting and monitoring a number of health-related areas and disease outbreaks.

So there are information-heavy maps detailing the spread and prevalence of illnesses such as malaria, influenza and infectious diseases (HIV/AIDS, STDs, tuberculosis, diphtheria and others) for regions around the world. The data used to create the the maps come out of the centralized information system for infectious diseases (CISID) database.

According to Devon Cancilla, Ph.D., dean, business and technology at American Sentinel University,
there is real career potential for IT pros that specialize in GIS technology, such as ESRI’s ArcGIS software, in the healthcare industry.  These organizations are looking to hire information technology professionals to help them develop new ways to harness the data integration and spatial visualization capabilities of GIS.

We recently spoke with Cancilla to learn more about GIS technology and the career opportunities it engenders.  His university offers online classes and degrees in GIS technology. “The philosophy of American Sentinel’s bachelor’s in GIS curriculum is to prepare students for real workplace issues and challenges using state-of-the-art, industry leading software products such as ESRI’s ArcGIS and open source technologies,” says Cancilla.

See the next page for Tom's IT Pro's interview with Cacilla.

James Alan Miller is Managing Editor of Tom's IT Pro. He is a veteran technology journalist with over seventeen years of experience creating and developing magazine and online content. Founding editor of numerous business and enterprise computing sites at the internet.com network, James headed up the After Hours section at PC Magazine, as well as hardware and software sections of various Windows publications.

(Shutterstock image credit: Neuron)