GeoAccess (GIS mapping)

GeoAccess, Inc. is the company that pioneered the use of geographic data to analyze the accessibility of health care networks. Prior to GeoAccess’ work in the early 1990s, the accessibility of health care networks was estimated by comparing zip codes of health care providers and consumers. GeoAccess developed software applications which allowed the accessibility of health care networks to be accurately measured based on the geographic coordinates of health care provider locations. For the first time, employers and government-sponsored programs could establish access standards to take the actual accessibility of health care providers into account when selecting health care networks. By the mid-1990s, GeoAccess-based analysis was the industry standard for measuring the accessibility of health care networks.[1][2]

PLS assisted with “Tiger” data processing backend jobs to convert USPS mapping data into SQL Server and compressed DB files for the applications. Wrote the mapping report / overlay rendering engine used in the desktop app & the CGI report request engine. The report request engine used a service to look for report request files (XML) that got dropped into a directory, generated the report files (Images and PDF) & routed them to either a mail server of the file server. Later on we rewrote it to use MSMQ to distributed reporting servers. This was all used by a web based front end to process and email reports to customers. This included mapping, charts etc..included generating distance calculations for these reports based on the scale & overlay of way points (Doctors’ offices).

Several people from that team went on to work at Garmin.