Healthcare · Facility Access Analysis
Drive time is the primary access metric in healthcare. Patients don't choose facilities that are hard to reach — even when those facilities are better. Hospital systems, urgent care operators, pharmacy chains, and specialty clinics all face the same location decision: where is there underserved population within the drive times that patients will actually tolerate? DriveZone maps that answer on real road networks.
15 min
The federal HPSA threshold and clinical best-practice standard for primary care geographic access. Facilities sited outside this envelope face structural utilization headwinds regardless of quality.
Healthcare use cases
Urgent care viability depends almost entirely on the density of population within a 10-minute drive. In a market where patients have an existing option within 8 minutes, a new center within 12 minutes will face structural utilization challenges. Map the 5-minute and 10-minute drive zones before selecting a site. Identify markets where the nearest competing center is 15+ minutes from a population cluster.
Outpatient facilities designed to extend a hospital's service area need to be sited at the drive-time boundary of the parent campus's primary service area — typically the 20–30 minute edge — to capture incremental patients rather than cannibalize existing volume. Drive-time overlap analysis between the outpatient location and the main campus is essential before committing to a lease or construction.
Pharmacy chains use a 5-minute drive standard for primary site selection, targeting locations where 25,000+ residents are within that threshold. Age distribution within the polygon is a key differentiator — pharmacy utilization is significantly higher in populations with 20%+ of residents aged 65 and above. Competitor density (pharmacy locations per 10,000 residents) is the primary saturation metric.
Specialty services — orthopedics, cardiology, oncology — tolerate longer patient drive times (20–30 minutes) because appointment frequency is lower and referral relationships drive volume more than proximity alone. Site analysis should focus on the 30-minute access polygon and the concentration of referring primary care physicians within that zone, in addition to population and age distribution.
Ambulatory surgery centers require a sufficient base of commercially insured patients within a 20–30 minute drive, plus a cluster of surgical specialists willing to perform cases at the site. Drive-time analysis should be overlaid with income distribution data — ASC viability correlates strongly with the proportion of households above $75,000 in household income within the primary service area.
Feature breakdown
Generate concentric drive-time polygons at 5, 10, 15, and 30 minutes simultaneously. Each zone renders as a distinct layer, revealing how the facility's access area expands across drive-time thresholds — the standard view for healthcare service area planning and CON (Certificate of Need) filings.
Pull the demographic profile of each access zone: total population, population aged 65+, median household income, and household count. The 65+ segment and income distribution are the two leading indicators for most healthcare utilization models — available at Census block-group granularity inside the real drive-time polygon.
Plot existing healthcare facilities within your access zones — urgent care centers, ERs, primary care clinics, or pharmacies, depending on your use case. Count facilities per zone and calculate the population-per-facility ratio against category benchmarks to identify underserved gaps or saturated sub-markets.
Compare drive-time polygons between a main hospital campus and a planned outpatient site. Measure overlap to determine whether the outpatient facility will extend access to new populations or cannibalize existing patient volume. Essential for CON applications and board-level capital allocation decisions.
FAQ · Healthcare access
Healthcare markets
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