Modeling Physical Accessibility to Health Care and Geographic Coverage (AccessMod©)
Why AccessMod©?
Availability of care and access to health care are two important considerations in health systems and have direct impact on the burden of disease.
Availability of care refers to the spatial distribution of services without considering if these services are physically accessible
Among the different aspects which define accessibility, physical accessibility to health care looks at how physically accessible a service is to the population, the demand, without considering if the supply would be enough to cover the demand.
Understanding the performance of health systems from a geographic perspective requires the ability to study both supply and demand at the same time. The measure resulting from this type of analysis is referred to as "geographic coverage".
This type of analysis and the possibility to propose solutions to scale up an existing health facility network, are difficult processes which require specific tools and reliable information.
In response to this need, the World Health Organization (WHO), currently through the IER/KMS/EHL unit, has worked on different projects focussed on the elaboration of several models, now grouped in a GIS extension called AccessMod.