Available online 26 March 2022, 100503

In this study we measure and map the system-wide spatial accessibility to good quality nursing home care for all counties in the contiguous United States, and use an ‘imputed post-lasso’ machine learning technique to systematically examine this accessibility measure's associations with a broad range of county-level socio-demographic variables. Both steps were carried out using publicly available datasets. Analyses found clear evidence of spatial patterning in accessibility, particularly by population density, state and the populations of specific racial minorities. This has implications for outcomes that extend beyond the care homes and we highlight a number of policy measures that may help to address these shortcomings. The ‘out-of-sample’ predictive performance of the machine learning approach highlights the method's usefulness in identifying systematic differences in accessibility to services.

accessibility

data science

equity

health economics

machine learning

nursing homes

© 2022 Published by Elsevier Ltd.