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Geographic Information Services
Geographic Information Services

GIS informing the COVID-19 pandemic response in Santa Clara County

Over the past 18 months, GIS tools and applications have played a significant role in informing Santa Clara County’s response and community support for COVID-19 pandemic. This presentation covers how GIS informed the planning and implementation of COVID related work to enhance Public Health services for community members. The following topics will be covered in this presentation:

  • Manual work processes for setting up and maintaining the GIS tools and applications for generating COVID analytical reports.  
  • Enhancing geocoding tool for generating aggregated data reports at various geographical levels and population subgroups.
  • Automating analytic report generation through Python (Jupyter), R Studio. 
  • Public-facing data sharing through open data portal applications.
  • Advanced GIS applications for informing community program planning. 

Speakers

Mandeep

Mandeep Sidhu

Senior Epidemiologist
Santa Clara County Public Health Department

Mandeep received her master’s in public health from University of Alabama with a concentration in maternal and child health. She is trained in advanced research methods, principles of epidemiology and data science, communicable disease epidemiology, and healthcare organization and policy. For the past thirteen years, she is working at the Santa Clara County Public Health Department and is currently titled senior epidemiologist. She has led projects focusing on health surveillance, data management, analysis, and mapping health data. She played a pivotal role in developing the Public Health Department Open Data Portal. She holds extensive knowledge about the rules and regulations surrounding personal health information and personal identifiable information. She helped developed the data governance framework for the Public Health Open Data Portal, including date de-identification and data release guidelines. She is passionate about work focusing on open data, health disparities and inequities, healthcare access, demographic and vital statistics data, and place-based epidemiology. As a senior epidemiologist, she uses multiple analytical software for summarizing, mapping, and sharing data with wide array of audience. Currently, she is a part of the county COVID-19 response team where she is using data analytics and GIS applications to inform COVID-19 related program planning and resource allocation for the disproportionately impacted communities in the county. Before moving to California, she worked at the University of Alabama for a multicenter national HIV research study handling patient-level clinical health and demographics information. She is a physician by training and practiced medicine for two years where she managed the reproductive health clinic while providing medical services to underserved women and children.

Sampa Patra

Sampa Patra

Senior GIS Analyst
Technology Services and Solutions
County of Santa Clara

A 14-year employee at the County of Santa Clara, Sampa is a senior GIS analyst in the Technology Services and Solutions Department, responsible for GIS professional services.

Sampa holds double master’s degrees in geography, one with emphasis on GIS from San Jose State University and another with cartography and geomorphology from Calcutta University, India.
Sampa's focus is in Geocoding, Spatial Analysis, Automation with python and emergency response support. Currently she is supporting Public Health Department for COVID 19 and exploring 3D and imagery data.

Resources

GIS informing the COVID-19 pandemic response in Santa Clara County (PDF)