Remoteness from care remains a major challenge to equitable provision of health services worldwide. Beyond the difficulties associated with geographically and climatically rugged terrain, there are also socioeconomic, cultural, and technological challenges associated with remote residence. The objective of this review is to examine the factors whereby remoteness can be associated with sociodemographic disadvantage in health care and describe some of the methodologies for measurement and analysis of remoteness, with examples from the literature, particularly focusing on Canada. As surrogates for remoteness, simple measurements of direct distance or travel time may correlate well with more complex measures and can be performed relative to specific health care services of interest (for example, tertiary obstetric service). These metrics may also be measured, as general proxies for service availability, to various sizes of population centres. More complex measures of remoteness may also incorporate modes of available transport and availability of specific services into an index such as the Canadian Index of Remoteness. As an important independent predictor of health, remoteness requires careful predictive modelling because of potential complex nonlinear relationships, edge effects created by health system zone boundaries, and covariance with other sociodemographic factors and Indigenous population proportions. To combat disadvantage caused by remoteness, innovation in health service delivery, policy, and technology is required. Health-resource allocation must be adequate, and innovative technological advances-such as remote monitoring, expert clinical support, and artificial intelligence algorithms-must be supported by development of appropriate technological infrastructure, targeting remote regions. With these, the barriers to equitable health imposed by remoteness can be overcome.
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