ArticleThe journal of behavioral health services & research2023
When a Straight Line Is Not the Most Direct Method: an Evaluation of Straight Line Versus True Distance Metrics for Patients in Rural Settings.
Article in The journal of behavioral health services & research, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed, 6 citations in OpenAlex.
- Bridging the rural logistics penalty: quantifying structural costs and designing policy mechanisms for home TCM delivery to older adults with chronic respiratory diseases.BMC health services research · 2026Article
- Travel Time to Treating Facility and Mortality in Men With Prostate Cancer.JAMA network open · 2025Article
- Has the Gratuité policy reduced inequities in geographic access to antenatal care in Burkina Faso? Evidence from facility-based data from 2014 to 2022.Frontiers in global women's health · 2024Article
- Bringing the Workforce Shortage into Focus.The journal of behavioral health services & research · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Telehealth has been hypothesized as a solution for rural barriers precluding access to healthcare, of which distance remains one of the most significant. Providers, institutions, and policymakers may use distance as a metric to determine whether to keep, or to end, telehealth services. Although commonly used, straight line distance (SLD) may not reflect the true burden of distance (TD) for rural patients. A retrospective record review was conducted to determine the difference between SLD and TD for patients seeking behavioral health care at a large outpatient center. The discrepancy between SLD and TD ranged from 0.5 to 83.4 miles of additional actual travel distance (mean = - 17.6). The mean percentage that SLD underestimated TD was 31.9%. Findings highlight that when considering distance as a determining factor for telehealth services, SLD is an inaccurate representation of the travel burden on this sample of rural patients, suggesting the utility of TD as an alternative.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.