Deriving Hospital Catchment Areas from Mobile Phone Data

Abstract

Delineating catchment areas of medical facilities is essential for estimating the quality of a health-care system and to maximise the efficiency of health service provision. One critical shortcoming of previous approaches are manifested in their comprehensive assumptions about a hospital's patients by using census data or gravity models. In contrast, our approach uses anonymised mobile and landline phone data to derive hospital catchment areas. Our goal is not to assess the quality of the health care system, but to identify the geographic areas, in which people actually use a hospital. Thus, our results reveal new insights into the catchment areas of hospitals by minimising assumptions about demographic factors.