Access to care: analysis of the geographical distribution of healthcare using Linked Open Data

TL;DR

This paper creates a comprehensive, linked open dataset of global medical facilities to analyze geographical access to healthcare, improving data transparency and resource allocation insights.

Contribution

It introduces a unified semantic dataset of worldwide medical facilities by integrating and linking multiple open-source databases, enhancing data completeness and accessibility.

Findings

Evaluated data sources for completeness and correctness

Linked diverse datasets for comprehensive coverage

Facilitated better understanding of healthcare access distribution

Abstract

Background: Access to medical care is strongly dependent on resource allocation, such as the geographical distribution of medical facilities. Nevertheless, this data is usually restricted to country official documentation, not available to the public. While some medical facilities' data is accessible as semantic resources on the Web, it is not consistent in its modeling and has yet to be integrated into a complete, open, and specialized repository. This work focuses on generating a comprehensive semantic dataset of medical facilities worldwide containing extensive information about such facilities' geo-location. Results: For this purpose, we collect, align, and link various open-source databases where medical facilities' information may be present. This work allows us to evaluate each data source along various dimensions, such as completeness, correctness, and interlinking with other sources, all critical aspects of current knowledge representation technologies. Conclusions: Our contributions directly benefit stakeholders in the biomedical and health domain (patients, healthcare professionals, companies, regulatory authorities, and researchers), who will now have a better overview of the access to and distribution of medical facilities.