Suboptimal geographic accessibility to comprehensive HIV care in the US: regional and urban-rural differences.

Suboptimal geographic accessibility to comprehensive HIV care in the US: regional and urban-rural differences. J Int AIDS Soc. 2019 May;22(5):e25286 Authors: Masiano SP, Martin EG, Bono RS, Dahman B, Sabik LM, Belgrave FZ, Adimora AA, Kimmel AD Abstract Achieving US state and municipal benchmarks to end the HIV epidemic and promote health equity requires access to comprehensive HIV care. However, this care may not be geographically accessible for all people living with HIV (PLHIV). We estimated county-level drive time and suboptimal geographic accessibility to HIV care across the contiguous US, assessing regional and urban-rural differences. We integrated publicly available data from four federal databases to identify and geocode sites providing comprehensive HIV care in 2015, defined as the co-located provision of core HIV medical care and support services. Leveraging street network, US Census and HIV surveillance data (2014), we used geographic analysis to estimate the fastest one-way drive time between the population-weighted county centroid and the nearest site providing HIV care for counties reporting at least five diagnosed HIV cases. We summarized HIV care sites, county-level drive time, population-weighted drive time and suboptimal geographic accessibility to HIV care, by US region and county rurality (2013). Geographic accessibility to HIV care was suboptimal if drive time was >30 min, a common threshold for primary care...
Source: Journal of the International AIDS Society - Category: Infectious Diseases Tags: J Int AIDS Soc Source Type: research