Background: Health services accessibility indicators with high reliability, validity, high timeliness and easy policy application can help to understand the current situation of medical resource supply and demand in a region and assist the government to allocate resources more effectively. However, in terms of the development of related indicators, it is difficult to protect the privacy of the residence of medical users from large databases or medical records, and to obtain the transportation cost of the actual use of medical and health services.
The purpose of this study was to develop a distance cost index based on the national public information about the disease prevalence rate and the population in the region to estimate the distance cost of actual service users. This index could take into account the privacy of the patient's residence and solve the limitation of using the national health insurance database in the past.
Methods: This study was a cross-sectional study and used secondary data analysis by SPSS and QGIS. It was mainly divided into the Verification group and the Index development group to calculate the medical treatment distance. Their data source came from Medical Center actual records of patients with diabetes and high blood pressure during 2017-2019 as Verification group and prevalence from National Public Information as Index development group. Finally, the consistency of the two groups' medical treatment distance is compared to verify the accuracy of the index development group.
Results: The estimated distances of the Index development group are high consistency (ICC>0.9) with the Verification group and after adjusting age and gender, there are also excellent R-square (98.1%, 92.7%). The disease cost for health care formula is developed by the present study with the prevalence and population from Public Information as an easy policy application and it can protect the privacy of patients in the further.