Health Care Accessibility Analysis Considering Behavioral Preferences for Hospital Choice

Abstract

Research on the potential accessibility of medical services has made great progress, but there is a large gap between the analysis results and the actual feelings of residents. With the refinement of urban management, the need for actual accessibility calculations reflecting the current status of medical service levels is becoming stronger. In modern society, as people work and live at an increasingly fast pace, people increasingly focus on time saving. However, in addition to travel time and distance, personal perceptions of medical facilities and access habits also influence residents’ choice of specific hospitals for medical treatment. With the combined effect of these factors, the actual status of accessibility of medical facility services is formed. In order to improve estimates of the actual accessibility and narrow the gap with residents’ subjective perceptions, this study leverages realistic data, such as real-time navigation prediction data that approximates residents’ actual travel time to hospitals and information on residents’ subjective behaviors in choosing specific hospitals for medical treatment. Finally, a new approach is proposed to further improve the existing Gaussian two-step floating catchment area (Ga2SFCA) method by fully respecting the important effects of distance cost and time cost, and combining them by using a weighted mean.