The relationship between dermatologist density in specific urban zip codes and population socioeconomic factors in a cross-sectional analysis

There is limited data regarding health disparities for access to health care. The majority of prior studies have focused on the primary care workforce and underserved patient populations with respect to lower socio-economic status, race and insurance status. Few studies assess these issues in dermatology. At the state level, increased numbers of both family physicians and specialists per capita are associated with higher quality of care. Even though increased numbers of physicians leads to better health outcomes, if these physicians are poorly distributed then there are subsets within the population that do not have ready access to care. Methods: New York (185 zip codes), Boston (24 zip codes), Chicago (66 zip codes), and Philadelphia (47 zip codes) were selected for the analysis based on their large, dense and ethnically diverse populations. Data for dermatologists' practice locations were gathered from the American Academy of Dermatology and correlated with demographic data from the United States census bureau 2010 by zip code. A 2-tailed Pearson correlation was performed to analyze the significance of the results.