Report
Identification of High-Need Rural Counties to Assist in Resource Location Planning for Primary Care
Policy File
Rural Health Research Gateway
01 May 2019
Abstract
Many of these rural counties lacking access to primary care safety net settings demonstrate clustering of multiple population health indicators that indicate low socioeconomic status, adverse health behaviors, limited access to healthcare, and poor environmental factors. In this supplemental brief, we performed a similar analysis to our previous work, but instead we used a different criterion for healthcare availability to subset rural counties to those with the greatest health needs. These modifications demonstrate the flexibility of our selection process in that it allows the user to change how the existing healthcare infrastructure is defined and the thresholds applied. The geographic distribution of population health indicators across rural counties indicate the presence of disparities in health and access to primary healthcare. Identifying which rural counties are high-need in the context of a limited primary care infrastructure is vital in order to allocate resources to improve their population health indicators. This simple selection process can lead to a more in depth needs assessment of the rural counties identified so that policy initiatives, programs, or interventions can be tailored to meet the healthcare needs of those counties.
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Details
- Title
- Identification of High-Need Rural Counties to Assist in Resource Location Planning for Primary Care
- Creators
- Charity BrenemanJan EberthJanice Probst
- Publication Details
- Policy File
- Publisher
- Rural Health Research Gateway
- Resource Type
- Report
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Health Management and Policy
- Identifiers
- 991021855176904721