Hospital Site Selection Analysis (original) (raw)
Michigan Community hospitals are tasked with serving diverse populations and providing a full range of medical procedures. Many healthcare facilities were built to serve large local populations (e.g. Detroit); others were intended to provide regional coverage across less populated areas (e.g. Alpena). The precise settings of these hospitals were dictated by a diverse set of geographical and historical factors, including the distribution of population at the time each facility was constructed, the physical characteristics of available sites, and the human and political context of the moment. In Michigan, it seems quite likely that the factors leading to the development of today's spatial constellation of 139 community hospitals were largely local and unique to each individual hospital. A multi-organization committee headed by the State of Michigan's Department of Community Health approached the authors with questions about how spatial analyses might employed to develop a revised community hospital approval procedure. In particular, the State was concerned with identifying populations with lengthy drive times to existing community hospitals. The methods used in this research quantify access to existing hospitals statewide, taking into account factors such as distance to nearest hospital and road network density to estimate travel time. Areas falling outside of a particular time threshold are identified as limited access areas (LAA). This criterion is now state policy in the evaluation of new community hospital proposals. Results help policymakers understand some of the spatial complexities associated with the demand and the accessibility dimensions of health care access and equity.
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