Geolocation of hospitalizations registered on the Brazilian National Health System’s Hospital Information System: a solution based on the R Statistical Software

Abstract

Objective:

to describe a solution enabling geolocation of hospital admissions (AIH), processed on the Brazilian National Health System’s Hospital Information System.

Methods:

in order to spatialize AIHs an R language script was written, based on the microdatasus and CepR packages; the script was applied to identify all AIHs in Goiás state in the year 2015; after downloading and pre-processing the data, the procedure for AIH spatialization was detailed.

Results:

of the 361,213 AIHs processed, we were able to retrieve 24,220 different ZIP codes (CEPs); from this set of ZIP codes, 23,910 (98.7%) were geolocated; these geolocated ZIP codes enabled spatialization of 97.7% of AIHs processed for the state of Goiás.

Conclusion:

it is possible to spatialize AIHs with a high success rate; the method detailed in this paper opens a new range of possibilities for the design of evaluation studies, formulation of policies and planning of health care actions.

Keywords:
Hospitalization; Information Systems; Automatic Data Processing; Spatial Analysis; Geographic Information Systems