Blog Post 6

Since Google Maps is incapable of importing more than 100 cells of patient data into each map, my client has decided that making multiple Google Maps of patients' age ranges, which will not include all 2,800 will no longer be the direction of this project. He has stressed that the pertinence of this project for his wife (the pediatrician) is mapping all patients' locations within the school district boundary lines - and from then on to place a representative number within each boundary of the total number of patients that reside there. So although utilizing Google Maps was originally a means to keep this project a live link for post completion, my objective now is to get all points mapped. Therefore from here on out I will solely be using ArcGis. This will however hinder my client's wife from being able to add/remove patients from the map once it is complete.

Dr. Meierdiercks has taken all of my patients' data and quickly converted the batch into lat/long coordinates so that I can finally import them all into ArcGis to start putting the project all together. I am definitely behind on my projected timescale, so I know that I will need to work extremely efficiently for the remainder of the semester. As far as mapping local resources (within 25 mi of the office), I am not sure of this is still part of my client's desired outcomes (or something that I will have time to do at this point), which is something I will need to follow up with him on as soon as possible.

Blog Post 5

My client has just prioritized the new subset of data to be mapped: patients based on DOB. As of right now I am sorting through all 2,790 patients and isolating them into age groups based on birth year (since there are so many), starting with the youngest, born in 2013. After doing so I will confirm with my client the number of maps - so the number of age groups he wants to have completed. Since each Google Map document is only capable of importing a maximum number of 100 cells, I still see this as a potential problem, as in some instances of birth years, the number of patients within each far exceeds 100. It seems most reasonable to have approximately 5 maps of age groups so about 500 mapped patients. 

I am still working with my data right now, which is a little frustrating because I did hope to have at least one map complete by this point. Hopefully within the next week I will finalize the details of my new data set, and have at least all age groups plotted - so that I can begin to add the final layers. Dr. M today mentioned a continuation of this project for future students; possibly mapping the first several age groups, and then having continuing students take on the following age groups of patients to map, and so on. This seems like a good idea, so in the semesters to come, this pediatrics patients project will gradually become more  comprehensive and complete!

Blog Post 4

While I am waiting for my client to give me the prioritized subset of patient data to be mapped, I wanted to go ahead and map out just a small portion (50 patients) just to see how my map would start to come together, including all other layers (local resources, school district boundaries, etc.) It is very clear through this small representation of patient data that mapping all 2, 788 patients would appear extremely clustered on the map. It is most likely that I will end up mapping just the patients with the newest client IDs - probably around 100 patients. I have also just obtained the school district boundary lines data set from CUGIR and now must convert that shapefile into a csv/xlsx file so that it can be imported into GoogleMaps.