Modeling the Impact of Tele-Health on Accessibility and Equity of Medical Resources in Metropolitan Cities in China

Background: Although the expansion of medical resources has largely alleviated challenges of "more diseases but fewer medicines", the growing urbanization and rapid aging in China have led to increasing demands of healthcare services in metropolitan cities. The uneven distribution of medical facilities makes services unequal for residents in the city. To achieve fair and rapid access to medical services, healthcare accessibility and equity have become key concerns. The introduction of tele-health, i.e., online visits or digital health, can help balance the distribution of medical resources to improve accessibility and equity, particularly for elderly patients with chronic diseases. Methods: To quantitatively assess the spatial accessibility of healthcare facilities, an improved two-step floating catchment area method with tele-health (i2SFCA-TH) is proposed to study the demand-supply ratio by considering traveling time, chronic diseases, and online visits based on services provided by community and tertiary hospitals. An optimization model using mixed-integer programming to maximize average accessibility under resource constraints could help improve overall accessibility and reduce differences in access among all residential divisions to achieve better equity in the region. Results: By applying the method in a metropolitan city in China, it is observed that the overall spatial accessibility of residential divisions in the city is 0.72, but the gap between the highest and the lowest reaches 2.36; i.e., significant differences exhibit due to uneven allocation of medical resources. By introducing tele-health, the gaps of access among different divisions can be decreased, with the largest gap reduced to 1.49, and the accessibility in divisions with poor medical resource allocation can be increased. Finally, the mean healthcare accessibility and equity in the study region can be improved to 0.75. In addition, it is shown that proper management of medical resources and patients' willingness to accept online visits could help improve accessibility and equity, which can provide insights for hospital management and urban planning. Conclusions: An integrated framework to quantitatively assess and optimally improve healthcare accessibility and equity of medical resource allocation through tele-health is presented in this paper. An i2SFCA-TH method and an optimization model are used in the framework, which provides hospital management and urban planners a quantitative tool to improve accessibility and equity in metropolitan cities in China and other countries.