# Health Care Accessibility Analysis Considering Behavioral Preferences for Hospital Choice
## 4 Discussions
### Limits of the Study  
Transportation time cost is an important factor influencing residents' choice of hospitals to visit, and people generally tend to choose to visit hospitals with a lower time cost. It is inaccurate to calculate the actual value of accessibility to medical facilities by time alone, because not everyone chooses their travel routes based on real-time road conditions, especially when they are familiar with their surroundings or are not too far away, and they tend to choose their travel routes based on their habits. Calculating the practical value of accessibility by distance alone is also inaccurate because it ignores the effect of actual road conditions, which are complex and variable in large cities, especially for long-distance trips, where most residents choose their travel paths based on real-time road conditions. Arbitrarily combining time and distance to calculate the actual value of medical facility accessibility is unscientific, and the weights of both must be determined scientifically. This study creatively uses the preference of hospital choice to combine the two organically,  
Figure 7: Accessibility variation calculated by two methods at 8:00 a.m.  
which can analyze the actual accessibility of urban medical facilities more scientifically and accurately, and enable management decision makers to understand the real situation of the urban operation. Of course, this study still has many limits. In the study of this paper, 20,979 records needed to be crawled at each moment, and 12 moments were crawled in a day, 25,748 records need to be crawled per day. If the whole study area was subdivided according to the area of the smallest community as the threshold, the number of records to be crawled was 6,253,524 per day, which is 24.8 times more than the original scheme, and the workload increases sharply. The spatial interpolation method can retain the original refinement characteristics of the accessibility analysis results while refining the rough results on the one hand, and reduce the workload of data collection and processing on the other. Therefore, the spatial interpolation method is applicable to the accessibility optimization analysis, but the interpolation threshold is not the smaller the better. The selection of the interpolation threshold should be further studied in the future to achieve a balance of performance and quality. For a specific disease, when patients believe that the medical level of each hospital is roughly equivalent, they mainly determine the target hospital based on distance cost or time cost. This study focuses on this situation and proposes a new accessibility calculation method to take into account both distance cost preference and time cost preference. The proposed method is based on the 2 SFCA method, which is widely used in accessibility analysis. In order to fully consider the medical habits of residents, a questionnaire survey was conducted in this study to understand the current status of residents' actual medical care choices. Since the input parameters of the new method took into account the subjective nature of residents' medical treatment choices, the calculated results of the accessibility of medical facility services were more in line with the subjective feelings of residents. Theoretically, when \(W_{t}=1\), the new method becomes the traditional Ga2 SFCA method based on travel time. When \(W_{t}=0\), it becomes the traditional Ga2 SFCA method based on travel distance. Compared with the accessibility analysis method which only considers time cost, the new method which considers both time and distance can bring more realistic results. The new method had an impact on the entire study area, but this impact was slight for the vast majority of the area. Accessibility improved to varying degrees in areas between decentralized hospitals, while it decreased in areas near hospitals.