If you're a really big company, with many locations around the country, how do you keep track of all that? ... With a great map, of course!

I recently read a CNN article about the Community Health Systems network being hacked - exposing the names, Social Security numbers, physical addresses, birthdays and telephone numbers of 4.5 million patients. That's mind boggling, isn't it?!? The article included a map (see screen-capture below), but it was small and didn't really provide enough detail to be very useful.

I'm always looking for different ways to use SAS, and I thought maybe we could use it to plot the locations of their 206 hospitals on a map, so people could easily see if their hospital is one of those impacted by the hackers. My new/improved SAS version is below - you can click it to see the full size map, and it will let you hover your mouse over each marker to see the hospital name. I also included the full text list of all the hospitals (below the map), in case you want to search by city name, etc.

That's a nice looking SAS map, eh?!? You're probably wondering "How'd he do that?!?" ...

Well, I started with a list of all the hospitals, and the city & state where each was located. I used Proc Geocode to find the latitude & longitude of the cities, and then plotted a marker at each of those locations using annotate. I used Proc SQL to count the number of hospitals and states, and saved the results into macro variables which I also annotated on the map. ODS HTML allowed me embed html tags so that each marker has hover-text with the name of the hospitals. And, most importantly, it's all data driven (no hard-coding of marker locations or numbers) - therefore to change what I'm plotting on the map, all I have to do is change the data!

Have you got some data that you might want to plot on a map like this? Here's a link to the SAS code, in case you want to try your hand at re-using it. Feel free to leave a comment about this map, or a map you might create with your own data!