Measuring Accessibility to Healthcare Using Taxi Trajectories Data: A Case Study of Acute Myocardial Infarction Cases in Beijing

Several methods have been applied to measure healthcare accessibility, ie, the Euclidean distance, the network distance, and the transport time based on speed limits. However, these methods generally produce less accurate estimates than actual measurements. This research proposed a method to estimate historical healthcare accessibility more accurately by using taxi Global Positioning System (GPS) traces. The proposed method’s advantages were evaluated vis a case study using acute myocardial infarction (AMI) cases in Beijing in 2008. Comparative analyses of the new measure and three conventionally used measures suggested that the median estimated transport time to the closest hospital with percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) capability for AMI patients was 5.72 minutes by the taxi GPS trace-based measure, 2.42 minutes by the network distance-based measure, 2.28 minutes by the speed limit-based measure, 1.73 minutes by the Euclidean distance-based measure; and the estimated proportion of patients who lived within 5 minutes of a PCI-capable hospital was 38.17%, 89.20%, 92.52%, 95.05%, respectively. The three conventionally used measures underestimated the travel time cost and overestimated the percentage of patients with timely access to healthcare facilities. In addition, the new measure more accurately identifies the areas with low or high access to healthcare facilities. The taxi GPS trace-based accessibility measure provides a promising start for more accurately estimating accessibility to healthcare facilities, increasing the use of medical records in studying the effects of historical healthcare accessibility on health outcomes, and evaluating how accessibility to healthcare changes over time.