Its importance lies in the improvement over considering the individual sources of information separately, where none on its own provides an adequate summary.
The 2SFCA method not only has most of the advantages of a gravity model, but is also intuitive to interpret, as it uses essentially a special form of physician-to-population ratio.
[2][3][4] In essence, applying the accessibility measure formulated by Shen (1998) the 2SFCA method is an automated procedure for measuring spatial accessibility as a ratio of primary-care physicians to population, combining two steps: It has been recently enhanced by considering distance decay within catchments[5] and called the enhanced two-step floating catchment area (E2SFCA) method.
Furthermore, the use of capping certain services according to nearby population size, can improve the accuracy when analyzing across areas of different environments[6] (i.e. rural and urban).
The method has been applied to other related public health issues, such as access to healthy food retailers.