Michigan's Department of Community Health (MDCH) is responsible for managing hospitals through the utilization of a Certificate of Need (CON) Commission. Regulation is achieved by limiting the number of beds a hospital can use for inpatient services. MDCH assigns hospitals to service areas and sub areas by use patterns. Hospital beds are then assigned within these Hospital Service Areas and Facility Sub Areas. The determination of the number of hospital beds a facility subarea is authorized to hold, called bed need, is defined in the Michigan Hospital Standards and published by the CON Commission and MDCH. These standards vaguely define a methodology for calculating hospital bed need for a projection year, five years ahead of the base year (defined as the most recent year for which patient data have been published by the Michigan Hospital Association). MDCH requested a reformulation of the process. A comprehensive guide and associated code as interpreted from the hospital standards was developed. Additionally, methodologies for other states were investigated and compared to Michigan's Bed Need methodology. Langley et al., 2010. A Methodology for Projecting Hospital Bed Need: A Michigan Case Study. Source Code for Biology and Medicine 5:4.

In the summer of 2004, a multi-organizational committee headed by the State of Michigan's Department of Community Health (MDCH) approached us with questions about how spatial analyses might be employed to develop a revised community hospital approval procedure. Three objectives were set. First, the committee needed visualizations of both the spatial pattern of Michigan's population and its 139 community hospitals. Second, the committee required a clear, defensible assessment methodology to quantify access to existing hospitals statewide, taking into account factors such as distance to nearest hospital and road network density to estimate travel time. Third, the committee wanted to contrast the spatial distribution of existing community hospitals with a theoretical configuration that best met statewide demand.

An article in the International Journal of Health Geographics presents our efforts to first describe the distribution of Michigan's current community hospital pattern and its people, and second, develop two models, access-based and demand-based, to identify areas with inadequate access to existing hospitals. IJHG Article

Also the final report to MDCH is available online as attachment C within the Hospital Bed SAC Nov. 10, 2004 meeting minutes MDCH Hospital Bed SAC Meeting Minutes

As part of our ongoing research for the State of Michigan, Department of Community Health, Certificate of Need Program (CON), we calculate radial distances between existing and proposed locations for building and relocating health care facilities and services. The process of computing these radial distances incorporates several steps. First the existing and proposed location addresses are checked for errors and corrected. Second the addresses are geocoded. Due to inherent positional error in geocoding, the addresses are geocoded with Yahoo Geocoding API and ESRI ArcGIS 9.1 and visually compared to maps produced with MapQuest and Google Maps. Third the geocoded address coordinates are brought into ArcGIS and projected into the Michigan GeoRef projection. Fourth linear distances are calculated between locations using the Point Distance (Analysis) Tool within ArcGIS. More on Michigan´s CON review standards