Abstract
The purpose of this study is to clarify the precedence of secondary medical service areas(SMSAs) in Hokkaido that should introduce telemedicine. A patient trip model was developed based on the production-constrained model which is a family of spatial interaction models and a spatial analysis of patient trip was taken using geographic information system(GIS). The patient trip data were obtained from a report named “survey results of patient trip of National Health Insurance patients in Hokkaido in May 2000”. The number of patients was 79,458 for inpatient and 1,402,231 for outpatient. The attraction parameter β based on number of hospitals in SMSA and the distance parameter γ were calculated by the multiple regression analysis, respectively. Four kinds of patient trip patterns were formed by mean values of above two parameters of all areas in Hokkaido. The patterns were shown on GIS with traffic networks and geographic features. As the results, adjusted R2 of the model were high(0.754 for inpatient and 0.819 for outpatient), indicating that the patient trip in Hokkaido could be explained well by the number of hospitals in each SMSA and the distance among the SMSAs. In addition, it became clear that most of the SMSAs which had high precedence of introducing telemedicine were distributed in eastern areas of Hokkaido.
