Projecting health care factors into future outcomes with agent-based modeling

Abstract

Human behavior is dynamic; it changes and adapts. In this chapter, we describe modeling approaches that consider human behavior as it relates to health care. We present examples the demonstrate how accounting for the social network structure changes the dynamics of infectious disease, how social hierarchy affects the chances of getting HIV, how the use of low dead-space syringe reduces the risk of HIV transmission, and how emergency departments could function more efficiently when real-time activities are simulated. The examples we use build from simple to more complex models and illustrate how agent-based modeling opens new horizons for providing descriptions of complex phenomena that were not possible with traditional statistical or even system dynamics methods. Agent-based modeling can use behavioral data from a cross-sectional representative study and project the behavior into the future so that the risks can be studied in a dynamical/temporal sense, thus combining the advantages of representative cross-sectional and longitudinal studies for the price of increased uncertainty. The authors also discuss data needs and potential future applications for this method.