Determining the Effects of Limited Transportation on Heart Disease Risk Factor Prevalence

Access to transportation is an important aspect of healthcare utilization. If there is a barrier present, this can consist of long travel distances, lack of vehicle, transportation costs, and lengthy travel times are all factors which can prevent patients from seeing their provider. This often causes potential risk factors to go undiagnosed, and eventually leads to poorer health outcomes among lower-income populations and those who live in rural areas – creating a disparity. The purpose of this research aims to evaluate how access to personal vehicles and distance to healthcare facilities affects the prevalence of heart disease risk factors since the outcome for chronic heart disease can depend on proximity to the closest health facility. During this project, households that owned no vehicles or households where the number of members was greater than the number of vehicles owned were included in the study. From this point, the person trips (how often a household member travels on an average weekday) for each household and the prevalence of preventative care were used in a multivariate linear regression model to determine the correlation between trip frequency, vehicle ownership, and how often they will go to health check-ups. Statistically, the R-squared value showed that there was a very weak correlation between the variables. While lack of vehicle ownership did show some significance between preventative care visits, the trip frequency of a household showed inconsistent results, thus, it can be concluded that there is no relationship.