Hawaii DOH Environmental Health Administration (EHA) Goes Geospatial

Jason Bunker
Windsor Solutions, Honolulu, HI
Andy Matsumoto
Hawaii DOH EHA, Honolulu, HI

GIS for Environmental, Community and Public Health
Tuesday March 6, 2012 - 10:45 am to noon

The Hawaii State Department of Health's Environmental Health Administration (EHA) has made great strides with GIS and geospatial technologies in recent years. EHA has integrated GIS capabilities into several applications to enhance finding and viewing environmental information across the state. We will showcase three separate systems developed at EHA that utilize GIS and geospatial tools.

EHA implemented an Environmental Health Warehouse in late 2009. This warehouse extracts information from the administration's environmental and health systems, reconciles the points of interest, and presents a holistic view of the data to consumers. A spatial inquiry system is used to find and explore known environmental information within locations and areas.

The Safe Drinking Water Branch designed and implemented a custom map viewer application, providing county and environmental health specialists ways to query water system, facility and sample point information. The solution also provides field users with a way to improve locational data with GPS-collected coordinates using custom mobile software on Trimble handheld devices.

The Clean Water Branch (CWB) created a custom water quality data viewer that gives internal and external users access to water quality data and beach warnings, advisories and postings. The system also includes a mapping utility that helps the CWB quickly and easily define affected locations and areas.

EHA has integrated ArcGIS Server technologies into many of its systems available inside and outside of the organization, often overlaying ArcGIS server layers over GoogleMaps as well as deriving geopolitical data to enhance the search capabilities of its inquiry tools.