The idea of the CHDC is to support researchers with consolidated and harmonized data from publicly available information sources. Researchers can use interactive spatial analyses based on secondary data as an additional data source for their studies, for example, analyses on the socioeconomic structure of hospital catchment areas.

The diversity of disciplines in the consortium requires a wide range of spatial scales, up to and including spatial models using cartographic grids. The use of these grids in terms of the soundness of disaggregation and small-scale estimators, as well as methodological transparency, represent the research questions for the CHDC.

In our qualitative study with Dutch and German health researchers from the „Cross-Border Institute of Healthcare Systems and Prevention“ initiative (n=9, semistructured interviews), more than half of the participants indicated that spatial aspects play a (at least minor) role in their research. In general, the study found an interest in spatial research questions, but at the same time a reservation about the feasibility of spatial analyses and the potential validity of the results.

This research focuses on accompanying multidisciplinary cross-border health care research by developing a Cross-Border Health Data Compass (CHDC) for the northern Dutch-German border region.

Requirements analysis, visual analytics, web visualization, spatial data science, dashboards.