An integrated agent-based approach for modeling disease spread in large populations to support health informatics

Disease spread has a much broader impact on public health than the important issues of illnesses and deaths. Among these are chronic health problems, reductions in national wealth, government instability, and crime. Here, we describe an integrated approach for computational health informatics that includes individual-based population construction, and agent-based modeling of dynamics. We restrict dynamics modeling to epidemiology. We itemize technical challenges and provide a case study of the Ebola outbreak in Monrovia, Liberia, with discussion of mobile treatment centers.