An analysis of the academic literature on simulation and modelling in health care

Abstract

This article describes a multi-dimensional approach to the classification of the research literature on simulation and modelling in health care. The aim of the study was to analyse the relative frequency of use of a range of operational research modelling approaches in health care, along with the specific domains of application and the level of implementation. Given the vast scale of the health care modelling literature, a novel review methodology was adopted, similar in concept to the approach of stratified sampling. The results provide new insights into the level of activity across many areas of application, highlighting important relationships and pointing to key areas of omission and neglect in the literature. In addition, the approach presented in this article provides a systematic and generic methodology that can be extended to other application domains as well as other types of information source in health-care modelling.

Keywords:

• health care modelling
• literature review
• methodology

Acknowledgements

We thank the anonymous referees for their very helpful comments. We are also grateful for the support of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) under grant EP/E019900/1, and for the support and input from the other members of the RIGHT team.