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P. Einzinger, M. Gyimesi, G. Zauner:
"How Health Care Systems React on Epidemics";
Talk: EUROSIM 2010 - 7th Congress on Modelling and Simulation, Prague, Czech Republic; 2010-09-06 - 2010-09-10; in: "Proceedings of the 7th Congress on Modelling and Simulation", M. Snorek, Z. Buk, M. Cepek, J. Drchal (ed.); Vol.2 Full Papers (2010), ISBN: 978-80-01-04589-3; 764 - 770.

Standard approaches to simulating epidemics of infectious diseases include the classic SIR-model and agent based simulations. Another interesting application for modelling and simulation are studies of the dynamics of whole parts of health care systems and their reimbursement schemes. We show how to integrate the transmission of infectious diseases into a model of this type. It is agent based and consists of three main agent types: Patients, Medical Providers and Medical Problems. The latter represents different diseases which patients can contract. Each patient implements a statechart for every medical problem type. These statecharts model the random generation of new diseases and corresponding medical problem objects which control disease progression and the treatment pathways a patient takes. A central "Health Market" object manages provider search of the patients. As an example, we integrate influenza as an infectious disease into the model with a separate object type "InfluenzaEpidemic" that stores the characteristics of every new epidemic during simulation time. Transmission of the disease takes place between agents which are connected by a network based on spatial relations. Each agent stores his past infections so he does not get the same virus strain twice. Experiments show that this resembles the behaviour of SIR-models and that this model can
provide insight into the impact of epidemics on the utilization of the health service system and its reimbursement.

Epidemics, SIR-Model, Health Services Research, Agent based modelling