Simulating a societal information system for healthcare

Societal information systems are intended to assist the members of a society in dealing with the complexities of their interactions with each other, especially regarding the resources they share. Because the members are distributed and autonomous, we believe that software agents, having these same characteristics, are a natural basis for representing the members and their interests in a societal information system. This paper describes a simulation of an agent-based societal information system for healthcare. Our design methodology is based on agent-oriented modeling, which we apply to analyze and design the system and its simulation. We execute the simulation to investigate four different strategies for assisting a person in choosing a physician, combined with three waiting strategies in three common social network models. The results show that the societal information system can decrease the number of annual sick days per person by 0.42–1.84 days compared with choosing a physician randomly.