LSU Research Bites: New Modeling Approach Helps Hospital Planning for Crowding and Care Access
January 09, 2026
Human movement in cities is a bit like water, following the path of least resistance. For example, people choose hospitals based on their physical accessibility and how crowded they are. But how much does distance matter to this choice?
Dr. Fahui Wang, a professor in the LSU Department of Geographic and Anthropology, and collaborator Dr. Lingbo Liu at Harvard (also a previous visiting scholar at LSU) recently published a study that charts the balance between neighborhoods' access to nearby hospitals and how those hospitals handle crowding and manage resources. They developed an equation that better predicts human movement to hospitals.
“We kept seeing two partial pictures of the same reality,” Liu said.
“On the demand side, people choose hospitals based on how accessible they are. On the supply side, hospitals “spread” their capacity across nearby communities. Models captured each side separately—but they disagreed on how strongly distance matters.”
The researchers developed a solution that minimizes the differences between demand-side and supply-side flows, producing a single shared distance-decay function. Using this function, they accurately modeled patients' hospital choices in Florida. An ongoing paper is testing the method on nationwide data.
The new method, called r2SFCA (revised Two-Step Floating Catchment Area), serves as a universal predictor of supply–demand balance and accurately predicts where patients actually go. This lets planners compute expected inpatient flows with far more confidence.
“With this approach, planners can more accurately map who lacks adequate hospital access, predict patient flows under new scenarios (a new clinic, closure, or telehealth expansion), and predict other human flows for other types of public services,” Liu said.
Read the study: Reconciling 2SFCA and i2SFCA via distance decay parameterization
Editor's Note: The research is funded by the National Cancer Institute (NCI) under Grant No. R01CA267990-01 (Wang) and partially supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) grant #1841403 (Liu).
Next Step
LSU's Scholarship First Agenda is helping achieve health, prosperity, and security for Louisiana and the world.