Problem
Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.
Healthcare Accessibility
Rural Communities
Resilience
Healthcare Disparities
Smart Communities
Measuring Healthcare Accessibility and Resilience for Smart and Connected Rural Communities: A Florida Panhandle Case Study
🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses planning challenges in rural U.S. healthcare, including resource scarcity, limited transportation access, and insufficient disaster resilience, by proposing a fine-grained healthcare equity planning framework integrated with spatial intelligence. For the first time, this work unifies four dimensions—supply, travel, utilization, and resilience—within census block group (CBG)-level analytical units. By synthesizing multi-source data such as mobility records and road networks, it employs an Enhanced Two-Step Floating Catchment Area (E2SFCA) model alongside constrained optimization algorithms to quantify the dynamic impacts of hurricanes and pandemics on healthcare systems. The analysis reveals that 46.7% of rural areas lack medical facilities, with per capita resources falling below half those of urban counterparts. Accordingly, this research proposes actionable, resilience-oriented service strategies incorporating mobile clinics and telemedicine.
📝 Abstract
Rural communities in the United States face persistent healthcare disparities, with fewer providers and facilities, longer trips to care, lower health literacy, and weaker transportation and broadband infrastructure than their non-rural counterparts. Beyond any single barrier, healthcare accessibility is shaped jointly by the geographic availability of services, residents'ability to reach those services, realized utilization, and the capacity of local systems to remain operational during disruptions, which are often examined separately and at coarse spatial scales, limiting their usefulness for community planning. We present a fine-grained, multi-source longitudinal measurement study of healthcare accessibility in Florida, with a focus on the hurricane-prone Florida Panhandle. We integrate healthcare-facility points of service, monthly mobility records from January 2018 through April 2021, Census Block Group (CBG)-level demographic data, and road-network data to compare rural and non-rural communities from supply, travel, utilization, and resilience perspectives. We find that 95.57% of the Panhandle's land area is rural and that 46.7% of rural CBGs contain no healthcare facility in the pooled inventory. Rural residents have less than half the per-capita facility availability of non-rural residents. These disparities remain after measured demographic adjustment, while longitudinal patterns reveal substantial disruptions around Hurricane Michael and the COVID-19. Building on this evidence, we formulate an actionable planning framework that combines E2SFCA-based access estimation, stakeholder-weighted prioritization, and constrained deployment models for mobile clinics, non-emergency medical transportation, telehealth, and disaster-resilient services. The study demonstrates how community-oriented spatial intelligence can support equitable and resilient healthcare planning in rural regions.
Innovation
Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.
Healthcare Accessibility
Multi-source Data Integration
E2SFCA
Resilience Measurement
Constrained Deployment Optimization
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