GIS Automated Delineation of Hospital Service Areas

"This is a highly useful book that provides a thorough and detailed treatment of geospatial concepts, models, and methods for accurately delineating hospital service areas. It highlights important methodological issues such the modifiable areal unit problem and many concepts (e.g., distance decay) that are essential for reliably capturing the relevant health care market segments and informing pertinent health policies. The book is comprehensive in its coverage of methods and applications (which include GIS-based methods for estimating travel time, deriving distance decay functions, and implementing the Huff model). Its clear presentation and the case studies will be helpful even to readers with a limited background in this area. This is an excellent book for researchers and practitioners in the health sector and social sciences interested in learning the conceptual basis and methods of accurately and effectively delineate hospital service areas. Mei-Po Kwan - Institute of Space and Earth Information Science, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong This important and innovative book presents state-of-the-art computationally intensive methods for harnessing big data to identify hospital service areas. With its detailed examples and code, practitioners and researchers can ""hit the ground running"" in identifying service areas for all kinds of healthcare, social service, and retail facilities over large geographic areas. The authors’ clear and in-depth discussion makes these complex, data-intensive methods accessible and do-able for a wide audience. Sara L McLafferty – Department of Geography & Geographic Information Science, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA Dr. Fahui Wang’s insightful methodological work provides an essential guide and toolkit for those seeking to understand the impact of geography on health and health care. As a scientist who has spent most of my career at Dartmouth, home of the Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care, which was first published nearly a quarter of a century ago by Dr. John E. Wennberg and colleagues, I fully appreciate the innovative approaches for automating delineation of hospital service areas using state-of-the-art geospatial methods that are made accessible in this publication. Anna N. A. Tosteson - The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, USA"