A novel approach to incorporate frontier areas into urban-rural geographic classifications: Integrated Metropolitan-to-Frontier Area Codes.

ABSTRACT:

Purpose

To develop an urban-rural-frontier classification that integrates urbanicity and geographic remoteness and captures nuances in population and land area distributions invisible in traditional coding schemes, thereby providing a framework to measure health outcomes and access to care across the full urban-to-frontier continuum.

Methods

We created tract-level Integrated Metropolitan-to-Frontier Area Codes (tIMFAC) by combining the US Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service's Frontier and Remote Area (FAR) codes with Rural-Urban Commuting Area (RUCA) codes, classifying tracts as metropolitan, micropolitan, frontier-micropolitan, small town/rural, and frontier-small town/rural. We compared population and land area distributions and median distances to health

SUBMITTER: Gibson BJ 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12664327 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature