Towards Equitable Healthcare: A Cross Dataset Analysis of Healthcare and Telehealth Access

ABSTRACT History has repeatedly shown that when it comes to healthcare, there exist significant disparities across different sub‐populations. Part of this problem is challenges with access to healthcare services and providers. In recent years, we have seen solutions emerge that attempt to address this issue, namely telehealth. But little to no work has been done to glean insights into factors contributing to lower access and whether telehealth adequately supports populations that struggle with physical access issues. In this paper, we present findings from an exploratory, cross‐dataset analysis of healthcare access in Virginia, USA. We conducted quantitative and qualitative analyses lyses to determine correlations between socioeconomic factors and physical access. We found that population density significantly impacts physical access to healthcare. We also found that lower income communities in rural areas appear to be less satisfied with the quality of care and less likely to have adequate access to alternative options such as telehealth services. Our work has implications for research aimed at understanding healthcare access and practice that aims to derive solutions to close the healthcare access gap.