Modeling Human Mobility Behaviors in Healthcare Access: Integrating Spatial and Social Dimensions

Healthcare access is essential for fostering resilient communities and improving health outcomes. Limited access to healthcare services can negatively affect healthcare utilization and exacerbate existing health disparities. Traditionally, healthcare access has been conceptualized in terms of potential access, often measured by the distance to the nearest facility. However, this perspective overlooks the behavioral dimension of access, which captures how people actually utilize existing facilities. To address this research gap, this paper examines realized access to advance our understanding of healthcare access by integrating both spatial and social dimensions into human mobility modeling. Specifically, we develop a mobility behavioral model based on discrete choice theory to uncover people's decision-making process in healthcare access. Model parameters are then estimated using maximum likelihood method. We further conduct a case study to examine human mobility patterns in pharmacy access in Los Angeles County, California. Our results highlight that both spatial proximity and social similarity are critical determinants in modeling people's access behaviors. Particularly, social similarity indicates that people are more likely to access pharmacies located in communities with sociodemographic characteristics similar to their own. Our mobility model also achieves higher predictive accuracy than the random forest model. Overall, this paper offers insights to support decision-making in healthcare access planning, emphasizing that services should be both geographically proximate and socially accessible to the communities they serve.