CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Besides being a cool toy, the geocoding feature is actually extremely useful to us. We have a pool of volunteers that we need to match up with callers, and being able to quickly locate potential volunteers who are in the same local area as the caller is efficiently handled by this tool. Saves a lot of time.

At the Physician Health Program of BC, about half that cases that we have involve referral to a family doctor.  This can be more complicated than just phoning up a GP, for geographical (doctors living in remote areas) and social reasons (not wanting to have friends / colleagues as family physician).  And often involves quite a few activities (generally phone calls).

We have a group of family physicians across the province who have signed up as available to take on physicians as patients.  They are all contacts in CiviCRM, and we have them tagged. 

Using the proximity search filtered by tag, we can find all the family physicians within x kms of the client, and have a filtered list of GPs to start with.

Also, in doing a simple search of all contacts with a tag and then mapping the results, we can see the geographical concentration of our resources, so we know where in the province we need to put effort into recruiting GPs for the program.

So helpful!