Int. J. Advanced Networking and Applications Volume: 09 Issue: 02 Pages: 3387-3390 (2017) ISSN: 0975-0290 3387 Cloud Based Spatial Analysis for the Health Sector: a Case Study of Egypt Abdelrahman M. Helmi Department of Information Systems, Canadian International College, Cairo, Egypt Email: abdelrahman_helmi@cic-cairo.com Mona M. Nasr Department of Information Systems, Helwan University, Cairo, Egypt Email: drmona_nasr@fci.helwan.edu.eg Randa A. Mohamed Department of GIS, Ministry of Health and population, Cairo, Egypt Email: randa.randa.mohammed@gmail.com -------------------------------------------------------------------ABSTRACT--------------------------------------------------------------- As it is one of the most important and sensitive sectors, decisions related to the health sector are always critical. So it must be built on accurate information in order to weight the positives and negatives of each option and consider all the alternatives to determine which option is the best for that particular situation. The health sector ultimately faces basic challenges of operations, logistics, resource allocation, customers, and management. As it’s true that information can help overcome the hurdles, this paper raises the relation between the spatial analyses based on Cloud Computing and the health sector improvement. It presents the vital role of the spatial analysis and the health geography in improving the health sector services. In addition, it presents the significance of the Cloud based GIS. Finally, it presents the usage of the Cloud based GIS for the hospitals distribution in Egypt as a case study. Keywords - Spatial Analysis, Cloud GIS, Healthcare, Cloud Spatial Analysis. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date of Submission: Sep 10, 2017 Date of Acceptance: Sep 28, 2017 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. INTRODUCTION With solving a lot of the common flaws by drawing maps and visualizing spatial distributions to accurately measure distances and areas, here comes the value of the Geospatial Information Systems in improving the health sector services in order to track and control diseases and identify health care shortage areas to map populations at risk to start the process of redistributing the resources according to accurate indicators. The value of the GIS would be more effective by applying the concept of cloud computing that will provide the feature of the location independence access where the GIS can be accessed from anywhere and anytime. Also it provides the application infrastructure and the feature of the resource pooling to all the related partners. This paper is divided to seven sections. Section one gives the introduction. Section two presents the old relation between the spatial analysis and the healthcare. Section three demonstrates the vital role for the health geography in improving the health sector services. Section four explains the significance of the Cloud based GIS and its advantages while section five gives a brief explanation about the proposed cloud platforms for the geo-processing. Section six gives a case study for the hospitals distribution in Egypt using spatial cloud analysis. The last section is the concluded outcomes and the extended future work. 2. SPATIAL ANALYSIS AND HEALTHCARE How location can influence health is an old concept in medicine. As far back at the time of Hippocrates (3rd century B.C.), physicians discovered that certain diseases tend to occur in some places and not in others. In fact, different locations on Earth are usually associated with different profiles: physical, biological, environmental, economic, social, cultural and sometimes even spiritual profiles that affect and affected by health, disease and healthcare [2]. In 1854, a major cholera outbreak in London had already taken nearly six hundred lives when Dr John Snow, using a hand-drawn map, showed that the source of the disease was a contaminated water pump. By plotting each known cholera case on a street map of Soho district (where the outbreak took place), Snow could see that the cases occurred almost entirely among those who lived near the Broad Street water pump. Snow recommended that the handle of this pump be removed, and this simple action stopped the outbreak and proved his theory that cholera is transmitted through contaminated drinking water. People could also see on this map that cholera deaths were not confined to the area around a cemetery of plague victims and were thus convinced that the infection was not due to vapors coming from it as they first thought [1].