Measuring spatial accessibility to healthcare for populations with multiple transportation modes.

Few measures of healthcare accessibility have considered multiple transportation modes when people seek healthcare. Based on the framework of the 2 Step Floating Catchment Area Method (2SFCAM), we proposed an innovative method to incorporate transportation modes into the accessibility estimation. Taking Florida, USA, as a study area, we illustrated the implementation of the multi-mode 2SFCAM, and compared the accessibility estimates with those from the traditional single-mode 2SFCAM. The results suggest that the multi-modal method, by accounting for heterogeneity in populations, provides more realistic accessibility estimations, and thus offers a better guidance for policy makers to mitigate health inequity issues.