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Assessing consistency among indices to measure socioeconomic barriers to health care access
Many places within rural America lack ready access to health care facilities. Barriers to access can be both spatial and non-spatial. Measurements of spatial access, such as the Enhanced Floating 2-Step Catchment Area and other floating catchment area measures, produce similar patterns of access. Ho...
Autores principales: | , , , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Springer US
2021
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8286164/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34305442 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10742-021-00257-5 |
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author | Conley, Jamison Hong, Insu Williams, Amber Taylor, Rachael Gross, Thomson Wilson, Bradley |
author_facet | Conley, Jamison Hong, Insu Williams, Amber Taylor, Rachael Gross, Thomson Wilson, Bradley |
author_sort | Conley, Jamison |
collection | PubMed |
description | Many places within rural America lack ready access to health care facilities. Barriers to access can be both spatial and non-spatial. Measurements of spatial access, such as the Enhanced Floating 2-Step Catchment Area and other floating catchment area measures, produce similar patterns of access. However, the extent to which different measurements of socioeconomic barriers to access correspond with each other has not been examined. Using West Virginia as a case study, we compute indices based upon the literature and measure the correlations among them. We find that all indices positively correlate with each other, although the strength of the correlation varies. Also, while there is broad agreement in the general spatial trends, such as fewer barriers in urban areas, and more barriers in the impoverished southwestern portion of the state, there are regions within the state that have more disagreement among the indices. These indices are to be used to support decision-making with respect to placement of rural residency students from medical schools within West Virginia to provide students with educational experiences as well as address health care inequalities within the state. The results indicate that for decisions and policies that address statewide trends, the choice of metric is not critical. However, when the decisions involve specific locations for receiving rural residents or opening clinics, the results can become more sensitive to the selection of the index. Therefore, for fine-grained policy decision-making, it is important that the chosen index best represents the processes under consideration. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-8286164 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2021 |
publisher | Springer US |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-82861642021-07-19 Assessing consistency among indices to measure socioeconomic barriers to health care access Conley, Jamison Hong, Insu Williams, Amber Taylor, Rachael Gross, Thomson Wilson, Bradley Health Serv Outcomes Res Methodol Article Many places within rural America lack ready access to health care facilities. Barriers to access can be both spatial and non-spatial. Measurements of spatial access, such as the Enhanced Floating 2-Step Catchment Area and other floating catchment area measures, produce similar patterns of access. However, the extent to which different measurements of socioeconomic barriers to access correspond with each other has not been examined. Using West Virginia as a case study, we compute indices based upon the literature and measure the correlations among them. We find that all indices positively correlate with each other, although the strength of the correlation varies. Also, while there is broad agreement in the general spatial trends, such as fewer barriers in urban areas, and more barriers in the impoverished southwestern portion of the state, there are regions within the state that have more disagreement among the indices. These indices are to be used to support decision-making with respect to placement of rural residency students from medical schools within West Virginia to provide students with educational experiences as well as address health care inequalities within the state. The results indicate that for decisions and policies that address statewide trends, the choice of metric is not critical. However, when the decisions involve specific locations for receiving rural residents or opening clinics, the results can become more sensitive to the selection of the index. Therefore, for fine-grained policy decision-making, it is important that the chosen index best represents the processes under consideration. Springer US 2021-07-17 2022 /pmc/articles/PMC8286164/ /pubmed/34305442 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10742-021-00257-5 Text en © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2021 This article is made available via the PMC Open Access Subset for unrestricted research re-use and secondary analysis in any form or by any means with acknowledgement of the original source. These permissions are granted for the duration of the World Health Organization (WHO) declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic. |
spellingShingle | Article Conley, Jamison Hong, Insu Williams, Amber Taylor, Rachael Gross, Thomson Wilson, Bradley Assessing consistency among indices to measure socioeconomic barriers to health care access |
title | Assessing consistency among indices to measure socioeconomic barriers to health care access |
title_full | Assessing consistency among indices to measure socioeconomic barriers to health care access |
title_fullStr | Assessing consistency among indices to measure socioeconomic barriers to health care access |
title_full_unstemmed | Assessing consistency among indices to measure socioeconomic barriers to health care access |
title_short | Assessing consistency among indices to measure socioeconomic barriers to health care access |
title_sort | assessing consistency among indices to measure socioeconomic barriers to health care access |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8286164/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/34305442 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10742-021-00257-5 |
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