Healthcare Openness and Access Project 2020 (prerelease)

The Healthcare Openness and Access Project (HOAP) is a collection of state-by-state comparative data on the flexibility and discretion that US patients and providers have in seeking and delivering healthcare. HOAP combines these data to produce 41 indicators of openness and accessibility. In turn, these indicators are aggregated into 5 broad categories (Professional Regulation, Institutional Regulation, Patient Regulation, Payment Regulation, and Delivery Regulation), which in combination form the overall HOAP index. In addition, there are 7 indicators grouped under the title “Watchlist”—variables worth tracking, but not incorporated at this time into the categories or overall index. The indicators, categories, and overall index are all scored on a 1-to-5 Likert scale. Using the data provided on HOAP’s website, readers may adjust the weight given to each indicator to custom-build subjective measures and rankings that differ from the ones presented in this paper. The authors have substantially revised and expanded the list of indicators since HOAP 2016 and HOAP 2018, as well as revising some of the previous data. In addition, HOAP 2020 replaces the previous 10 subindexes with 5 new categories. Therefore, the 2020 rankings are not directly comparable with prior HOAP rankings