Spatial distribution of community pharmacies in Quito, Ecuador: a territorial analysis using Business Intelligence
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https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3742-4865
Sandra María Villamagua-Villavicencio
Abstract
INTRODUCTION. Community pharmacies are key healthcare facilities involved in the provision of medicines and pharmaceutical services, whose territorial distribution shapes the organization of service availability in urban settings. In the Metropolitan District of Quito (MDQ), official records are primarily available in static formats, limiting systematic territorial analysis. OBJECTIVE. To analyze the territorial availability and spatial concentration of chain and independent community pharmacies in the MDQ through the development of maps and interactive dashboards using Power BI. METHODOLOGY. A quantitative descriptive study was conducted based on official pharmacy shift records published by the National Agency for Regulation, Control and Sanitary Surveillance in 2025. The dataset was cleaned, geocoded, validated, and analyzed using Business Intelligence tools to generate spatial and comparative visualizations. RESULTS. A total of 2,194 pharmacies were identified across 74 parishes, with a balanced distribution between independent (51.32%) and chain pharmacies (48.68%). The distribution showed high territorial variability, ranging from 1 to 155 pharmacies per parish, with a mean of 29.65 and a median of 11.5, indicating a non-uniform spatial pattern with concentration in a limited number of areas. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS. Findings suggest that territorial coverage does not imply homogeneous distribution, revealing differences in relative availability across parishes. The use of Business Intelligence tools enabled the transformation of administrative data into a descriptive territorial analysis framework, providing a basis for future studies incorporating population-based and accessibility-related variables.
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