Measuring Access Inequality in A Hybrid Physical-Virtual World: : A Case Study of Racial Disparity of Healthcare Access During CoVID-19

The disparity of resource access (e.g., food and healthcare) among different population groups essentially reflects social inequalities. Emerging information and communications technology (ICT) has facilitated the teleactivities that can replace or complement traditional physical visits, yet existing approaches for measuring access disparity still fail to consider virtual interactions. To this end, this study proposes a unified framework to measure access inequality in both physical and virtual spaces simultaneously, using the POIs’ visit patterns from mobile phone data to capture spatial unevenness of accessibility among different groups (physical space), as well as the Household Pulse Survey data to reveal the group disparity of teleactivity access (virtual space). In particular, a novel Access Inequity Index is proposed based on the Information Theory Index and the Theil Index, to reveal the access inequality in physical and virtual spaces respectively. Next, to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed framework, we examine racial groups and their disparity in physical-virtual healthcare access during the pandemic (April-July 2021) in U.S. 15 most populated metropolitans. Our results indicate: (1) race is a significant risk marker for underlying conditions that affect health, including telehealth access; (2) the usage of telehealth access aligns with the risk for COVID-19 infection, hospitalization, and death by race (e.g., the minority groups Black and Others are more vulnerable and in the higher demand of telehealth service); and (3) residential segregation impacts on the segregated pattern of physical healthcare access by race (e.g., the Black-dominant healthcare access zone highly matches the Black residential cluster in the south of Chicago), while such impacts may differ in different kinds of healthcare services (e.g., physicians, mental health practitioners, and dentists). Compared with traditional single-space approaches, the proposed hybrid-spaces approach not only provides more comprehensive and in-depth insights to understand the racial disparity in healthcare access, but also brings new opportunities to a broad scope of studies in social inequality measurement in future.