Research finds patients living outside metropolitan statistical areas travel farther for health care visits

In a research letter published online Nov. 5 in the Annals of Internal Medicine, nationally representative measures of patient travel patterns are presented.

Sandra L. Decker, Ph.D., from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality in Rockville, Maryland, and colleagues developed nationally representative estimates of patient travel time across provider types in a cross-sectional study using data from 2018 to 2021 from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey.

For each health care encounter (office visits, emergency department visits, and inpatient stays), patient and provider addresses were geocoded and travel time by car was calculated.

Overall, 825,292 office visits, 23,334 emergency department visits, and 10,552 inpatient stays were included in the unweighted sample. The researchers found that the median travel time was 12.7 minutes for primary care and 17.1 minutes for specialty care among physician visits.

Patients living outside metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) had longer median travel time, especially for specialty care (41.8 versus 15.9 minutes for outside versus inside MSAs).

The median travel time for emergency department visits was 13.6 minutes. Median travel time was 18.1 minutes for inpatient stays, with longer travel time for stays that did not originate in the emergency department, were surgical, or were pregnancy- or birth-related. For ambulatory care visits, 73.8 percent were within the patient’s county, and 81.5 and 93.3 percent were within 30 and 60 minutes of their home, respectively.

“These measures can inform choices of market definitions and provide national benchmarks for patient travel time,” the authors write.

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