Measurement, Optimization, and Impact of Health Care Accessibility: A Methodological Review

By Fahui Wang. Annals of the Association of American Geographers. Association of American Geographers, 2012

614 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Despite spending more than any other nation on medical care per person, the United States ranks behind other industrialized nations in key health performance measures. A main cause is the deep disparities in access to care and health outcomes. Federal programs such as the designations of Medically Underserved Areas/Populations and Health Professional Shortage Areas are designed to boost the number of health professionals serving these areas and to help alleviate the access problem. Their effectiveness relies first and foremost on an accurate measure of accessibility so that resources can be allocated to truly needy areas. Various measures of accessibility need to be integrated into one framework for comparison and evaluation. Optimization methods can be used to improve the distribution and supply of health care providers to maximize service coverage, minimize travel needs of patients, limit the number of facilities, and maximize health or access equality. Inequality in health care access comes at a personal and societal price, evidenced in disparities in health outcomes, including late-stage cancer diagnosis. This review surveys recent literature on the three named issues with emphasis on methodological advancements and implications for public policy.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Health, Transportation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c9e6cbc86f3aa0f237dbe7b7c0bd77c2c1af2323

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Q. Tang
2. Fahui Wang
3. Wei Luo
4. Y. Qi

In Health

1. Q. Tang
2. Fahui Wang
3. Wei Luo
4. Y. Qi

In Transportation

1. Q. Tang
2. Yu Liu
3. Zhengwei Sui
4. Fahui Wang
5. Yong Gao
6. Chaogui Kang
7. Wei Luo
8. Y. Qi

Citations in the corpus

• Uncovering Patterns of Inter-Urban Trip and Spatial Interaction from Social Media Check-In Data (2013, background): “Wang [23] summarized several forms of f(d), among which the power law function d is widely used.”
• Planning toward Equal Accessibility to Services: A Quadratic Programming Approach (2013, background): “In fact, even the gravity-based index is considered a special case of a more general formulation of accessibility (Wang, 2012), where the distance-decay function can be discrete (eg, 2SFCA), continuous [eg, a power function in the gravity-based index; or a Gaussian function as in Dai (2010)], or a…”