Company
Date Published
Author
CARTO Contributors
Word count
978
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

The urban-rural divide in America has significant implications for healthcare access, with rural areas facing a doctor shortage and healthcare disparities. Traditional methods for assessing healthcare accessibility have limitations, including ignoring patient agency and not accounting for congestion or multiple travel modes. Researchers Jamie Saxon and Daniel Snow developed the Rational Agent Access Model (RAAM), which uses an agent-based simulation to incorporate multiple costs, including congestion and travel time, and can scale to the national level. The RAAM model was applied to create a comprehensive origin-destination matrix of the entire United States, allowing for a nuanced understanding of healthcare access and its relationship with education level. The results show that areas in Utah and Southern Texas have high costs for accessing care, but also highlight the importance of considering multiple factors beyond just population density. The RAAM model has the potential to improve our understanding of access measures beyond healthcare, including access to jobs and public services.