Conceptual scheme of an agent-based model of regional health care

In the context of growing demand for medical services on the part of the population and limited available resources of regional health care, the development of tools that allow risk-free testing of management decisions in this area is of particular relevance. One of the modern approaches to solving this problem is agent-based modeling. Despite the fact that Russian and foreign studies have repeatedly proposed variants of models of individual components of the health care system, no comprehensive solution applicable at the regional level has been developed. The aim of the study is to substantiate the conceptual scheme of the agent-based model of regional health care (case study of the Vologda Region). We present the key characteristics of the model agents, its structure, assumptions and limitations, and justify the choice of input data for model construction and software environment for its realization. We outline the advantages of the proposed model, in particular, its applicability for testing management decisions in various subsystems of regional health care. The practical significance of the research results is that the output parameters of the model (indicators of population satisfaction with medical care, the level of workload on doctors, attendance of medical organizations, the mortality rate in certain classes of diseases), calculated within the framework of experiments, will be used to assess the effectiveness of the regional health care system along with the indicators of resource costs for its functioning. This will make it possible to compare the results of management decisions and choose optimal scenarios (optimizing the load on doctors, choosing a scheme of spatial location of medical infrastructure facilities, adjusting the volume of financing of medical organizations, etc.).