Social Factors in Creating an Integrated Capability for Health System Modeling and Simulation

The health system is a complex system of systems – changes in agriculture, transportation, economics, family life, medical practices, and many other things can have a profound influence on health and health costs. Yet today, policy-level investment decisions are frequently made by modeling individual systems in isolation. We describe two sets of issues that we face in trying to develop a platform, method, and service for integrating expert models from different domains to support health policy and investment decisions. The first set of questions concerns how to develop accurate social and behavioral health models and integrate them with engineering models of transportation, clinic operations, and so forth. The second set of questions concerns the design of an environment that will encourage and facilitate collaboration between the health modelers themselves, who come from a wide variety of disciplines.