Medical Decision Making Simulation Modeling and Health-care Decision Making on Behalf Of: Society for Medical Decision Making

s of Health Care Management Studies were reviewed. From the years 1982 through 1992, the abstracts were reviewed by one of the authors and more than 50 papers from potentially relevant abstracts were obtained and considered for inclusion. The references from the initial collection of articles were also reviewed to identify potentially relevant publications. Simulation is a broad term for a search on MEDLINE. Almost any method of imitating the behavior of a real system or process can be described as simulation. Furthermore, simulation was not a MeSH heading prior to 1988. We performed a MEDLmE search of human, English-language articles published in 1988 through April 1991 using the search term simulation. More than 900 references were displayed. However, most of these articles were related to physiologic, molecular, or genetic modeling or computer-aided instruction. Many others were physical simulations not using computer programs. These were manually excluded by the authors. Almost all of the remaining articles, about 80, were obtained and screened for suitability to this bibliography, and 25 were selected for inclusion. For health-care simulation articles published in 1980 or before, three large published bibliographies exist and are included in the reviews section. 12,15,17 Since these bibliographies are so extensive, and because personal microcomputers and interactive simulation languages have greatly simplified simulation analysis since 1980, we have restricted the applications in this bibliography to 1981 or later, with over 60% of the included applications published since the beginning of 1987. Older references for a particular application should be available from either references in recent applications or the bibliographic publications. Organaation of the Bibliography This bibliography is divided into six sections. The first section provides a list of introductory articles. These articles consist of short overviews of simulation methods or concepts and issues for the successful use of simulation. The second section references software reviews, vendor surveys, and bibliographies. Third is a list of books that are primarily recent simulation texts with varying levels of mathematical detail. This section also includes a management engineering text that recognizes simulation as an important tool and a hospital administration text that includes a collection of application papers. The next section is a list of operational health-systems applications. These papers describe simulations used for hospital bed and staff requirements planning, medical care facility location and design, patient and staff scheduling, and production issues. The fifth section is a list of medical decision-making applications. These papers illustrate the use of simulation to evaluate alternative procedures and protocols for managing diseases with respect to effectiveness and cost-effectiveness. The final section, &dquo;other applications,&dquo; provides a series of papers containing epidemiology models lacking an intervention component and other systems dynamics models for various uses, including technology assessment.