Caglar Koylu, PhD

Due to decreasing cost and travel times in transportation, human mobility patterns have an increasing impact on the dynamics of society, and economy including migration, transportation, and energy. A similar trend is also evident in health care systems, in which mobility provides freedom to patients to obtain health care from providers across regions, countries, and continents. Although mobility increases competition in the market, it is essential to monitor the patient choices in order to maintain the quality standards and responsiveness of the health system. Otherwise, the health system may suffer from geographic disparities in the access of quality and responsive health care. There is a critical need to monitor and analyze geographic and temporal patterns of patient mobility for a systematic evaluation of the quality standards and efficiency in a health care system. I will introduce an integrated approach to discover functional regions, structural changes, multivariate and spatio-temporal flow patterns in big longitudinal patient mobility data, with a case study of patient movements in Turkey’s health system between 2009 and 2013. The approach allows uncovering a variety of interesting patterns on patient mobility over space and time, and help identify the imbalances in supply and demand in health care service delivery.

Caglar Koylu, PhD