Measuring potential spatial accessibility of home healthcare services

Home healthcare encompasses a range of services that are provided in the home setting, including skilled nursing, physical therapy, and occupational therapy. In this paper, we study potential spatial accessibility of home healthcare services. Accessibility is a measure of the supply of and demand for home healthcare resources and the interaction between supply and demand within and between geographic regions. Home healthcare is unique in that the spatial interactions result from service regions selected by agencies, rather than from the distances between supply and demand locations. A new measure that simultaneously considers both staffing levels and eligible populations is developed and demonstrated via a case study using the state of Arkansas. To the best of our knowledge, no previous measure has been proposed to quantify potential spatial accessibility of home healthcare services within a geographic region. The results of the case study reveal disparities across the study area for each home healthcare service type.