Applicability of Artificial Societies to Evaluate Health Care Policies.

We propose the use of artificial societies to support health care policymakers in understanding and forecasting the impact and adverse effects of policies. Artificial societies extend the agent-based modeling paradigm using social science research to allow integrating the human component. We simulate individuals as socially capable software agents with their individual parameters in their situated environment including social networks.

Recent Advances in Systems and Network Medicine: Meeting Report from the First International Conference in Systems and Network Medicine.

The gathered together 200 global thought leaders, scientists, clinicians, academicians, industry and government experts, medical and graduate students, postdoctoral scholars and policymakers. Held at Georgetown University Conference Center in Washington D.C.

Policy Flight Simulators: Accelerating Decisions to Adopt Evidence-Based Health Interventions.

In this study, the authors used simulation to explore factors that might influence hospitals' decisions to adopt evidence-based interventions. Specifically, they developed a simulation model to examine the extent to which hospitals would benefit economically from the transitional care model (TCM). The TCM is designed to transition high-risk older adults from hospitals back to communities using interventions focused on preventing readmissions.

Service supply chains for population health: Overcoming fragmentation of service delivery ecosystems.

Introduction: Population health involves integration of health, education, and social services to keep a defined population healthy, to address health challenges holistically, and to assist with the realities of being mortal. The fragmentation of the US population health delivery system is addressed. The impacts of this fragmentation on the treatment of substance abuse in the United States are considered.

Vision for a systems architecture to integrate and transform population health.

Entities involved in population health often share a common mission while acting independently of one another and perhaps redundantly. Population health is in everybody's interest, but nobody is really in charge of promoting it. Across governments, corporations, and frontline operations, lack of coordination, lack of resources, and lack of reliable, current information have often impeded the development of situation-awareness models and thus a broad operational integration for population health.

Modeling research universities: Predicting probable futures of public vs. private and large vs. small research universities.

The future of the American academic research enterprise is considered. Data are presented that characterize the resources available for the 160 best-resourced research universities, a small subset of the 2,285 4-year, nonprofit, higher education institutions. A computational model of research universities was extended and used to simulate three strategic scenarios: status quo, steady decline in foreign graduate student enrollments, and downward tuition pressures from high-quality, online professional master's programs.

Developing a Policy Flight Simulator to Facilitate the Adoption of an Evidence-Based Intervention.

While the use of evidence-based interventions (EBIs) has been advocated by the medical research community for quite some time, uptake of these interventions by healthcare providers has been slow. One possible explanation is that it is challenging for providers to estimate impacts of a specific EBI on their particular organization. To address that concern, we developed and evaluated a type of simulation called a policy flight simulator to determine if it could improve the adoption decision about a specific EBI, the transitional care model (TCM).

Learning in the health care enterprise.

Introduction: The overall enterprise of health care delivery is considered. The 4 levels of the enterprise include clinical practices, processes that provide capabilities and information, structure that includes the business entities involved, and ecosystem that includes Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and Congress, as well as societal values and norms. It is argued that the enterprise of health care delivery needs to be transformed to enable high-quality, affordable care for everyone.

Interactive visualizations for decision support: Application of Rasmussen's abstraction-aggregation hierarchy.

Data visualization has of late received an enormous amount of attention from both researchers and practitioners. Even the popular press often includes impressive visualizations of various data sets. Interactive visualizations frequently include data visualizations, but they differ in that users employ the visualizations to make inferences, reach conclusions, and make decisions that result in changed and/or new visualizations.

Human interaction with policy flight simulators.

Policy flight simulators are designed for the purpose of exploring alternative management policies at levels ranging from individual organizations to national strategy. This article focuses on how such simulators are developed and on the nature of how people interact with these simulators. These interactions almost always involve groups of people rather than individuals, often with different stakeholders in conflict about priorities and courses of action.

Prospects for change.

This chapter addresses the prospects for change in health care delivery. The focus is on value - high quality, affordable care for everyone. We consider three domains that participate in the flow of value and the nature of the interfaces among these domains.

Systems engineering and management.

This chapter offers a systems view of healthcare delivery and outlines a wide range of concepts, principles, models, methods and tools from systems engineering and management that can enable the transformation of the dysfunctional "as is" healthcare system to an agreed-upon "to be" system that will provide quality, affordable care for everyone. Topics discussed include systems definition, design, analysis, and control, as well as the data and information needed to support these functions. Barriers to implementation are also considered.