The hospital accessibility of Acute Myocardial Infarction (AMI) emergency treatment is of great importance, not only for improving the survival rate of patients but also for protecting the basic human right to health care. Traditional AMI emergency treatment research often does not consider ways to shorten the travel time to hospitals for AMI patients and does not reflect the actual time it takes to travel to hospitals, which is critical to AMI emergency treatment. To avoid these shortcomings, this study proposes a method of accessibility measurement based on Web Mapping API (Application Programming Interface) to obtain travel time to hospitals during different periods, then calculated the AMI hospital accessibility based on these detailed data. This study considered the Shijingshan District, Beijing, China, as an empirical case. The study discovered significant differences in the temporal and spatial characteristics of the AMI hospital accessibility on weekdays and weekends. The analysis revealed that travel time to hospitals and traffic congestion are the two main factors affecting AMI hospital accessibility. The research results shed new light on the accessibility of urban medical facilities and provide a scientific basis with which local governments can optimize the spatial structure of medical facilities.

Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) poses a serious disease burden in China, but studies on small-area characteristics of AMI incidence are lacking. We therefore examined temporal trends and geographic variations in AMI incidence at the township level in Beijing. In this cross-sectional analysis, 259,830 AMI events during 2007–2018 from the Beijing Cardiovascular Disease Surveillance System were included. We estimated AMI incidence for 307 consistent townships during consecutive 3-year periods with a Bayesian spatial model. From 2007 to 2018, the median AMI incidence in townships increased from 216.3 to 231.6 per 100,000, with a greater relative increase in young and middle-aged males (35–49 years: 54.2%; 50–64 years: 33.2%). The most pronounced increases in the relative inequalities was observed among young residents (2.1 to 2.8 for males and 2.8 to 3.4 for females). Townships with high rates and larger relative increases were primarily located in Beijing’s northeastern and southwestern peri-urban areas. However, large increases among young and middle-aged males were observed throughout peri-urban areas. AMI incidence and their changes over time varied substantially at the township level in Beijing, especially among young adults. Targeted mitigation strategies are required for high-risk populations and areas to reduce health disparities across Beijing.

Several methods have been applied to measure health care accessibility, i.e., the Euclidean distance, the network distance, and the transport time based on speed limits. However, these methods generally produce less accurate estimates than actual measurements. This research proposed a method to estimate historical health care accessibility more accurately by using taxi Global Positioning System (GPS) traces. The proposed method’s advantages were evaluated vis a case study using acute myocardial infarction (AMI) cases in Beijing in 2008. Comparative analyses of the new measure and three conventionally used measures suggested that the median estimated transport time to the closest hospital with percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) capability for AMI patients was 5.72 min by the taxi GPS trace-based measure, 2.42 min by the network distance-based measure, 2.28 min by the speed limit-based measure, 1.73 min by the Euclidean distance-based measure; and the estimated proportion of patients who lived within 5 min of a PCI-capable hospital was 38.17%, 89.20%, 92.52%, 95.05%, respectively. The three conventionally used measures underestimated the travel time cost and overestimated the percentage of patients with timely access to health care facilities. In addition, the new measure more accurately identifies the areas with low or high access to health care facilities. The taxi GPS trace-based accessibility measure provides a promising start for more accurately estimating accessibility to health care facilities, increasing the use of medical records in studying the effects of historical health care accessibility on health outcomes, and evaluating how accessibility to health care changes over time.