Measurement and Inference in the Equity of Specialized Pediatric Healthcare

PI’s: Julie Swann & Nicoleta Serban

Aim 1: Quantify the access to healthcare for pediatric patients, including access to specialized care.  
Aim 2: Identify measures of healthcare quality for high-impact pediatric conditions.
Aim 3: Evaluate and explain inequities in the healthcare measures geographically and for subpopulations like Medicaid-eligible children including identifying areas of significantly positive or negative outcomes.

Equity is the absence of systematic disparities in healthcare delivery (e.g., access, quality, cost and outcomes) between groups of people.  Access has many elements including distance and resources for healthcare. This seed grant initiated our first detailed examination of equity in access across the state of Georgia, and it laid the foundation for a number of other ongoing studies.  

 

Publications

Nobles, M., N. Serban, and J. Swann (2014), “Spatial Accessibility of Pediatric Primary Healthcare: Measurement and Inference”.  Annals of Applied Statistics. 2014; 8: 1922-1946.
Garcia, E., N. Serban, J. Swann, A. Fitzpatrick (2015). “The Effect of Geographic Access on Severe Health Outcomes for Pediatric Asthma,” The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. 2015 Sep;136(3):610-8. doi: 10.1016/j.jaci.2015.01.030. Epub 2015 Mar 17
Gentili, M., K. Isett, N. Serban, J. Swann (2015), “Small-Area Estimation Spatial Access to Care and Its Implications for Policy Making”.  Journal of Urban Health. 2015 Oct;92(5):864-909. doi: 10.1007/s11524-015-9972-1
Li, Z., N. Serban, J. Swann (2015), “An optimization framework for measuring spatial access over healthcare networks”.  BMC Health Services Research 2015, 15:273  doi:10.1186/s12913-015-0919-8
Heier Stamm, J., N. Serban, J. Swann, and P. Wortley (2017), “Quantifying and Explaining Accessibility of H1N1 Vaccine during the 2009 pandemic”. Health Care Management Science 20(1); 76-93 (DOI 10.1007/s10729-015-9338-y)
Gentili, M., N. Serban, J. O’Connor, J. Swann (2017), “Quantifying Disparities in Accessibility and Availability of Pediatric Primary Care across Multiple States with Implications for Targeted Interventions”.  Forthcoming in Health Services Research -  Winner of paper competition at INFORMS Public Sector OR (2014).