Using Geographic Information System in Analyzing Hospital Accessibility : A Case Study in New Orleans

This paper examines the use of Geographic Information System (GIS) methods to analyze the special accessibility to primary healthcare /hospitals in New Orleans. Census data at the census track level were used to define the population distribution (demand) and the related socioeconomic attributes, as well as the hospital distribution (supply) at the zip code level. The first part of the paper examined potential population in the catchment area using simple GIS overlay analysis based on circular buffers around each hospital by creating concentric rings of 1000, 1500 and 2000 meters around the hospitals. Different scores ranging from 1 to 4 were assigned to each concentric ring with 4 being the highest/closest score and 1 being the lowest/furthest one. The second part of the paper examined the possible inequality among different ethnic minorities and income subgroups using Spatial Cluster Analysis (SCA) tools in GIS. Basic statistics were summarized for the entire population (White and three major ethnic minorities (Black, Asian and Hispanic)) with various accessibility scores. Generally, it was found that that hospital accessibility is very poor in New Orleans for the entire population with a weighted average access score of 1.81.