SheffieldR User Group Meeting

Most of the year has passed without much activity but we are pleased to announce that Dr Robert Smith and Oliver Dolin have volunteered to talk about their development of a web platform for healthcare professionals.

For full details please see the SheffieldR Website.

Abstract

Access to healthcare-professional administered medicines in England varies significantly across the country, resulting in inequitable health outcomes. Our interactive web platform identifies optimal new care site locations. It uses a greedy search method outlined in Schneider & Smith (2020) to rank candidate sites that maximize a range of user-selected objective functions such as: travel distance, travel time, adherence or health outcomes. Users can customize input parameters like travel cost and CO2/km, and estimate the impact of adding new sites on a range of outcomes including patient travel time, adherence, health outcomes, CO2 emissions, and out-of-pocket costs. The platform uses data on the socioeconomic and demographic structure of each Lower Super Output Area, a small community of around 1500 individuals, in England. It combines this with information on the prevalence of disease, and the relationship between geographic access and outcomes. It allows users to assess the impact of creating one or more of the sites identified on national and regional outcomes, and to assess the impact on inequalities. The platform is in beta stage, and we are interested in feedback from the research community on how to build upon this work going forward.