Medical access areas based on accessibility to medical facilities

the case of emergency notice hospitals in the main island of Okinawa

Abstract

The goal of this research is to verify “how effective is it to use the GIS for evaluating the medical supply system in Japan. “The medical map allows the simulation map to find out clearly the areas that lack in medical facilities, by using the GIS. By looking at the medical map, we can find out the areas with inadequate medical services because we analyze the map by imagining how a person would act in reality, by finding the nearest hospital to one’s own house. As a result, the methodology succeeded to indicate the region clearly, by creating a visual map. This map, created through the analysis using GIS, allowed for a large number of elderly people in the north medical administrative area to have access to the new hospital.