Welcome to the
Space, Health, and Community (SHAC) Lab

The lab contributes to the development of novel GPS-based and other techniques to quantify mobility and exposures throughout every day, urban activities. Globally, over half of the population now lives in urban areas — and many are highly-dense cities. However, urban settings are a relatively new phenomenon in human history. At the same time, increasing generation of and access to large, geospatial and imagery data means that innovation in processing, analytics, and interpretation are needed to understand relationships with health. Some of these tools are openly available on our website: LINK.

Health care services are a basic necessity for Michigan’s citizens. Services range from hospital acute care to nursing homes to lithotripsy. Community need for these services varies from community to community across the state, and depends upon the people in each community. Places with many people generally have greater patient volume, but many other social and environmental factors are involved. Further, need can vary over time as conditions and health care methods change.

Michigan's Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) is responsible for managing hospitals as mandated by a Certificate of Need (CON) Commission, which is charged with maintaining cost, quality and access dimensions of heath care for the State’s citizens. Regulation is achieved by determining the number of hospital beds for a range of designated services. This determination relies on important geographic properties: the locations and capacity of health facilities providing each service, the spatial distribution of patient demand for these services, and the geographic accessibility of the patient distribution to the facilities.

Hospitals are assigned to service areas based on the communities they serve. 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 MDHHS. These standards lay out methodology for calculating projected bed need for a range of covered health services. We assist the State’s CON section in determining the best methodology for each standard, in actually running the methodology regularly to update projected need, and to consider a range of questions related to health care access.

Link to Michigan's CON Review Standards

See Langley et al, 2010 in publications list

Since 2004 we have worked closely with the State of Michigan's Department of Health and Human Services (MDHHS) to address questions about geographic accessibility of Michigan citizens to health care, especially for services covered by Certificate of Need (CON). Two core objectives were set. First, CON personnel needed visualizations of the spatial pattern of Michigan's population, its hospitals, and its geographic distribution of covered health services. Second, CON required a clear, defensible assessment methodology to quantify geographic access to existing services statewide, taking into account factors such as distance to nearest hospital and road network density to estimate travel time.

We regularly produce maps of health care access, identify local and regional patterns in community utilization of different providers, and update access models based on the latest highway and facility data. Further, we investigate underlying relationships between geographic access and utilization across a range of health care services. We have published articles on a wide range of topics from these investigations.

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.