Integrating the Huff Model and Floating Catchment Area Methods to Analyze Spatial Access to Healthcare Services

Abstract

Analysis of spatial access to healthcare services is critical for effective health resource planning. Gravitybased spatial access models have been widely used to estimate spatial access to healthcare services. Among them, the floating catchment area (FCA) methods have been proved to be informative and helpful to the designation of Health Professional Shortage Areas (HPSAs). This article integrates the Huff Model with the FCA method to articulate population selection on services. Through the proposed approach, population demand on healthcare services is adjusted by a Huff Model-based selection probability that reflects the impacts of both distance impedance and service site capacity. The new approach moderates the over-or under-estimating of population demand that occurred with previous methods. Furthermore, the method uses a continuous distance impedance weight function instead of the arbitrarily defined subzones of previous studies. A case study of spatial access to primary care in Springfield, MO, showed that the proposed method can effectively moderate the population demand on service sites and therefore can generate more reliable spatial access measures.

Influence of Urban Multi-Criteria Deprivation and Spatial Accessibility to Healthcare on Self-Reported Health

“…2017, 1, 11 6 of 11 results of gravity-based measures of spatial accessibility, the interpreter should be cautious: the medium scores of these kinds of measures can range around 0.001 [20,39]. In this study, after normalizing the measure of spatial accessibility to healthcare, the mean is 0.04 ± 0.05 std.…”

“…Geographical accessibility refers to the distances between populations and healthcare services [18]; availability of healthcare services refers to the number of services that a patient can choose from [16]. Several methods have been applied to calculate spatial accessibility to healthcare based on potential population demand, healthcare supply, and travel impedance [17,[19][20][21]. Thus, these methods also consider the concept of spatial accessibility as the combination of (geographical) accessibility and availability of healthcare services.…”

Deprivation, Healthcare Accessibility and Satisfaction: Geographical Context and Scale Implications

“…for the census tracts. The results of this index must be interpreted cautiously because medium scores of gravity-based models of healthcare accessibility may range around 0.001 (Luo 2014;Luo and Qi 2009). Figure 3 geographically illustrates the index of healthcare accessibility: accessibility scores higher than 0.001 show that the city of Quito has a good geographical access to healthcare services in most of its census blocks or census tracts.…”

“…The improved gravity model does not consider competition among the different primary healthcare services, and, consequently, its use can lead to an overestimation of the accessibility of some services (Luo 2014). To overcome this limitation, we added the probability of people's selection of a healthcare service out of other available services to the gravity model.…”

“…Health analyses with implications in decision making have widely used measures of healthcare accessibility and social deprivation Bissonnette et al 2012;Boyle et al 2001;Cabrera-Barona et al 2015;Carstairs 1995;Crooks and Schuurman 2012;Delamater 2013;Havard et al 2008;Hiscock et al 2008;Lalloué et al 2013;Luo 2014;Wan et al 2013). There are different indicators that can be used to represent deprivation and health.…”