Agent-Based Simulation of Medical Care Processes in Rural Areas with the Aid of Current Data on ICT Usage Readiness Among Elderly Patients

Abstract

Sustainable health care in rural areas is confronted with enormous challenges as a result of numerous social trends. From a technical perspective, promising digital approaches are being advocated for patient-physician interaction in particular, which aim to facilitate medical care. However, a broad implementation of such systems has hardly been achieved so far and there is a lack of suitable methods to prospectively evaluate the medical, social and financial implications. Simulations represent a promising approach to quantify health care systems and the influence of system changes. In this study, an agent-based simulation is used to model patients and physicians as individual agents. This enables a detailed representation of the interactions taking place in the health care system within a given period of time. This approach allows the comparison of key performance indicators regarding the effects of different system changes. The use of information and communication technologies (ICT) is not a matter of course, especially for older people, for whom an increasing need for care must be assumed. To reflect this in the digitization of the health care system, the patients of the simulation are extended in this study by a factor involving ICT usage readiness, which was collected within the framework of a nationwide trend study. In addition, two appointment systems are developed that support digital ICT. An evaluation has revealed that senior citizens with the currently known ICT usage behavior are placed at a disadvantage with the introduction of digital appointment scheduling systems.