Evaluating access to healthcare: a modern spatial data workflow in R/python
Regular talk, 3:15 - 4:15 PM
There are many barriers to healthcare access in the United States. To address a subset of physical barriers health plans must understand and monitor the breadth depth and capacity of their provider networks to provide care for their members. Understanding the geospatial relationship between provider networks and the communities they serve is a necessary component for quantifying whether the healthcare network can meet the needs of that community.
Additionally at national state and local levels there are regulations that define what it means for a health care network to physically meet the needs of a community. Network adequacy standards set maximum travel time and/or distance thresholds that any member may travel to access care for a network to be compliant. In total this regulatory framework creates a need for reproducible and accurate methods of measuring physical access to healthcare which is crucial for meeting the needs of both health plan members and regulators.
To quantify potential barriers to healthcare and support efforts to build accessible health care networks for Kaiser Permanente we developed a modern workflow for analyzing evaluating and presenting healthcare provider network metrics. We developed an internal R package that leverages ESRI’s ArcPy spatial analysis library to quantify where in time and space Kaiser Permanente’s health care networks do (and do not) meet the needs of the communities we serve. Those results are then exported into several predefined data models hosted in a PostgreSQL database and made available for analytics workflows via Plumber API endpoints. From there we build both Shiny interactive web applications as well as R markdown documents to create modern data products that decision makers can use to satisfy regulatory requirements and provide actionable information to alleviate member access challenges.
We are excited to submit to the Cascadia R conference to highlight the ways in which R is being used to modernize network adequacy analysis. Many of the analysts that contributed to these projects live and work in Oregon so we also want to share how the data talents of the NW are contributing to the national mission of KP.
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Pronouns: he/himLocationAlec Kretchun is a data professional with Kaiser Permanente, focused on increasing access to healthcare. Alec spent 8 years working in environmental science academic research, focused on landscape modeling and geospatial data analysis. He then made the switch to the private sector, where he focuses on scalable open source solutions to meet regulatory and organizational needs. |