Modeling Physical Accessibility to Health Care and Geographic Coverage (AccessMod©)
How does AccessMod© work?
AccessMod© uses the functions of the ESRI ArcView 3.x© Geographic information System (GIS) software along with the Spatial Analyst© (raster analysis) extension to apply a specific set of algorithms on a series of GIS layers which contain information influencing the time taken by a patient to reach the nearest health facility depending on the mode of travel (for example, by feet, by car, etc).
Analysis of an existing health facility network is then done through the generation of the catchment areas and determination of the population covered by each of the facilities. This analysis can be done for in-patients and out-patients and can include different type of facilities simultaneously.
AccessMod© assists in determination of locations for new health facilities when scaling up the existing network and to perform different other types of analysis (e.g. for cost-effectiveness analysis). This function can be applied for in-patients or out-patients when dealing with only one type of facility at a time. In case of several. At present this function can be applied to only out-patients based systems if there is need to compare several types of facilities simultaneously.
A completely new analysis engine based on graph structure is at the core of the new version of AccessMod© (version 3.0) which makes it more realistic than version 2.2. It allow travelling time to be computed based on anisotropic movements (see Appendix 5). New analyses and ways of inputting data and outputting results, faster and improved user interface are the other improvements in the new tool.
For more information on the functions of AccessMod©, please refer to the user manual or the list of publications (see below).