Enhanced Two-Step Virtual Catchment Area (E2SVCA) model to measure telehealth accessibility

Abstract

The use of telehealth has increased significantly over the last decade and has become even more popular and essential during the COVID-19 pandemic due to social distancing requirements. Telehealth has many advantages including potentially improving access to healthcare in rural areas and achieving healthcare equality. However, there is still limited research in the literature on how to accurately evaluate telehealth accessibility. Here we present the Enhanced Two-Step Virtual Catchment Area (E2SVCA) model, which replaces the binary broadband strength joint function of the previous Two-Step Virtual Catchment Area (2SVCA) with a step-wise function that more accurately reflects the requirements of telehealth video conferencing. We also examined different metrics for representing broadband speed at the Census Block level and compared the results of 2SVCA and E2VCA. Our study suggests that using the minimum available Internet speed in a Census Block can reveal the worst-case scenario of telehealth care accessibility. On the other hand, using the maximum of the most frequent available speeds reveals optimal accessibility, while the minimum of the most frequent reflects a more common case. All three indicators showed that the 2SVCA model generally overestimates accessibility results. The E2SVCA model addresses this limitation of the 2SVCA model, more accurately reflects reality, and more appropriately reveals low accessibility regions. This new method can help policymakers in making better decisions about healthcare resource allocations aiming to improve healthcare equality and patient outcomes.