Clustering affordable care act qualified health plans to understand how and where insurance facilitates or impedes access to HIV prevention.

ABSTRACT:

Background

With access to and uptake of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP), the United States can prevent new HIV infections. To end the HIV epidemic, health insurance plans must facilitate access to comprehensive preventive care benefits. Since plan benefit designs vary considerably by plan, it is difficult to systematically determine plans that facilitate and restrict preventive services for PrEP.

Methods

We applied an unsupervised machine learning method to cluster 17,061 Qualified Health Plans offered to individuals. We examined the clusters to draw conclusions about the types of benefits insurance companies tend to group together in plans. Then we analyzed the geographic distribution of those clusters across the United States to assess geographic inequities in access to HI

SUBMITTER: Powers SD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11575131 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature