Healthcare System Engineering Access

This book bridges two areas of research, access modeling and healthcare system engineering, highlighting fundamental approaches on measurement of and inference on healthcare access. It begins with an introduction that provides a broad outline of the motivation and background for the need of understanding access for the healthcare system. The book moves on to characterize healthcare access within a classical multidimensional framework consisting of five dimensions, affordability, accessibility, availability, accommodation and acceptability. It then introduces the concepts of systematic disparities, reviews measures for systematic disparities, and presents a statistical framework for making inference on disparities with application to disparities in access. The book also introduces the concept of health outcomes in the context of prevention and chronic disease management. Final chapters describe the concepts of policy and network interventions and different data sources and structures with various inferential objectives.