Simulation modeling as an aid to decision-making in healthcare management: the Adjuvant Breast Cancer (ABC) trial

摘要

The paper presents simulation modeling as a decision support technique and suggests that it can be a useful for understanding problems related to health care, randomized clinical trials in this case. The paper shows that simulation may not be regarded as a tool for deriving solutions to certain problems. In fact simulation is better suited for understanding the problem and enhancing systematic debate between the problem owners. The paper also demonstrates the usefulness of combining different software to provide a comprehensive tailor-made package (ABCSim). The example used is based on modeling a randomized clinical trial for Adjuvant Breast Cancer.