Distance to care¶
Status: map published September 2026. This is a data page that supports two of our initiatives: 80 of the districts farthest from a child neurologist also post no findable seizure plan (Seizure-Safe Schools), and the pharmacy distances feed Medication access.
The gap¶
Everyone in Minnesota epilepsy care knows the specialists are in Rochester and the Twin Cities. Nobody had put a number on what that means for a child in Kittson County. Families far from a center also tend to face the slowest ambulances: in 31 of 87 counties the slowest tenth of ambulance runs take 20 minutes or more from dispatch to the scene (Minnesota Office of Emergency Medical Services, 2023).
What the data shows¶
We located every neurologist, child neurologist, and epilepsy subspecialist with a practice address in Minnesota or in parts of the Dakotas, Wisconsin, and Iowa (as far as Milwaukee and Des Moines), using the federal provider registry, and measured the distance from every school district office.
Try it: look up your district¶
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Child neurologists | 72 in Minnesota; 105 counting those we found in Iowa, Wisconsin and the Dakotas |
| Epilepsy subspecialists | 27 in Minnesota; 35 counting those states |
| Districts more than 60 miles from a child neurologist | 101 (about 70,000 students) |
| Districts more than 100 miles away | 11 |
| Of the 101 far districts, those also without a findable seizure plan | 80 |
| Districts more than 60 miles from a Level 4 epilepsy center | 205 (about 220,000 students) |
| Districts more than 100 miles from a Level 4 epilepsy center | 155 (about 150,000 students) |
| Districts more than 15 miles from any retail pharmacy | 15 (14 without a findable plan) |
Kittson, Roseau, Cook, and Big Stone counties are farthest. Distances are straight-line, so the drive is longer. Minnesota's Level 4 epilepsy centers, the highest designation, are Mayo Clinic in Rochester, the University of Minnesota Medical Center and Abbott Northwestern in Minneapolis, and Minnesota Epilepsy Group with Children's Minnesota in the Twin Cities.
How much hospital care seizures require¶
The distance numbers above say how far a family is from a clinic. They say nothing about how often Minnesotans actually end up in a hospital or emergency department for a seizure. We pulled that separately from AHRQ's HCUPnet, which draws on hospital discharge records reported by the Minnesota Hospital Association.
| Minnesota, principal diagnosis of epilepsy or convulsions | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inpatient stays, Minnesota hospitals | 4,042 | 4,338 | 4,618 |
| Emergency department visits (treat-and-release) | 12,247 | 13,007 | 13,524 |
| Minnesota resident inpatient rate per 100,000 | 64.1 | not yet released | not yet released |
Children carried more of this than adults. Minnesotans aged 1 to 17 made up 28.6 percent of Minnesota's epilepsy inpatient stays in 2023, against 16.5 percent nationally, and their own resident inpatient rate has run at or above the national children's rate every year HCUPnet reports. A Minnesota epilepsy stay in 2023 billed $50,555 in charges and cost the hospital $17,649 on average, both lower than the national mean, and in-hospital deaths from epilepsy ran below the national rate in every year from 2016 to 2023.
HCUPnet cannot isolate status epilepticus specifically. The closest available category, CCSR NVS009, bundles chronic epilepsy together with single convulsions and febrile seizures, so a status-epilepsy-specific Minnesota count would need record-level data MDH or the Minnesota Hospital Association would have to pull directly.
Source: Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, HCUPnet (State Inpatient and State Emergency Department Databases, Minnesota, data from the Minnesota Hospital Association; Community-Level Statistics; Nationwide Inpatient Sample), accessed 2026.
What comes next¶
- Giving the map to the Minnesota Epilepsy Program at MDH as a candidate "area of need."
- Pharmacy distance is now in the same file and the lookup tool, so one map shows the whole picture. The next pass swaps the federal registry for the Minnesota Board of Pharmacy list to drop closed stores.
Check yourself¶
1. What is a Level 4 epilepsy center?
The highest designation from the National Association of Epilepsy Centers: a center that can do full monitoring, complex drug management, and epilepsy surgery. Minnesota has four.
2. Why are border-state clinics included in the map?
A family in Luverne is about 28 miles from Sioux Falls and about 170 from Minneapolis, in a straight line. Leaving out Sioux Falls would overstate the gap in southwest Minnesota by more than 100 miles.
3. Does 'nearest child neurologist' mean they are taking new patients?
No. The federal registry shows who holds the credential and a practice address, not availability, so the distances are a best case.
Who uses this data¶
The map is meant for the Minnesota Department of Health, the Epilepsy Foundation of Minnesota and legislators working on rural care. Families looking for a specialist can find Minnesota's pediatric epilepsy programs in Resources & Support.