Incorporating human behavior in healthcare simulation models

For many years, simulation has been used to evaluate the outcomes from medical interventions designed to improve patients’ health. However in practice these outcomes can be greatly affected by patient behavior. For example, patients may not complete a course of a prescribed medication because they find the side-effects unpleasant. A study designed to evaluate this medication which ignores such behavioral factors may give unreliable results. In this paper we discuss some of the issues involved in incorporating human factors in simulation models, and we describe two models for screening for different diseases which have attempted to include behavioral factors