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Social Marketing with GIS Author: Christina A. Andrews 3130 Fairview Park Drive Phone: (703) 269-5592 In the past few years, we have seen a dramatic change in public health care providers' approach to providing services from a service-oriented to a consumer-oriented health care delivery system. Health care organizations and researchers have applied social marketing techniques to better understand and communicate with health care consumers. Social marketing applies commercial marketing concepts to health and social sciences. The Lewin Group partnered with Applied Geographics, Inc. (AGI), to apply GIS in the early stages of a social marketing campaign to identify, segment, and target consumers for the federal government. The Lewin Group, a health care consulting firm, cataloged and integrated relevant data sets describing populations served by Medicare, Medicaid, and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) and created a dynamic relational database for use in mapping the characteristics of these populations. AGI, a GIS consulting firm, created templates and a process for fast turnaround for maps and tables that graphically presented specific consumer characteristics. These maps will assist the government in deciding the best way to focus its marketing activities, thereby helping the government concentrate resources and improve the quality of services provided. |