CONTEXT Patients in rural areas may use less medical care than those living in urban areas. This could be due to differences in travel distance and time and a utilization of a different mix of generalists and specialists for their care. PURPOSE To compare the travel times, distances, and physician specialty mix of all Medicare patients living in Alaska, Idaho, North Carolina, South Carolina, ...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Only 3% to 5% of patients with acute ischemic stroke receive intravenous recombinant tissue-type plasminogen activator (r-tPA) and <1% receive endovascular therapy. We describe access of the US population to all facilities that actually provide intravenous r-tPA or endovascular therapy for acute ischemic stroke. METHODS We used US demographic data and intravenous r-tPA ...

Children receive priority in the allocation of deceased donor kidneys for transplantation in the United States, but because allocation begins locally, geographic differences in population and organ supply may enable variation in pediatric access to transplantation. We assembled a cohort of 3764 individual listings for pediatric kidney transplantation in 2005-2010. For each donor service area, w...

Geographic data management is essential for development of geo-related applications and systems. Fast access to a subset of data related to an area of interest with a sufficient precision is a common need for geographic applications. The mechanism for organizing data in the database determines how geographic features can be represented, whether or not the underlying database can be distributed ...

Outpatient rehabilitation is essential for the continuum of post-stroke care to optimize recovery after discharge home. However, despite receiving referrals, only a small percentage stroke survivors utilize these services. With ongoing pandemic, access outpatient has become serious concern, particularly patients living in rural Texas. This study examine geographic disparities clinics, including...

BACKGROUND To understand geographic variation in access to care over time in patients with kidney disease. METHODS We analyzed 4404 (weighted sample of 4,251,129) adults with kidney disease from the United States using the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey over 10 years. Three dependent variables were created to investigate variation in access: usual source of care, overall medical access to c...

SUMMARY This letter proposes a novel geographic channel assignment (GCA) framework for dynamic channel allocation (DCA) in broad-band wireless access networks (BWANs). The proposed GCA scheme is based on the characteristics of radio propagation, which focuses on the relationship between transmission distances and communication parameters, e.g., signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) etc., and uses a signa...