How to determine future EHR ROI. Agent-based modeling and simulation offers a new alternative to traditional techniques.

Effectively determining the future return-on-investment of regional healthcare delivery and electronic healthcare record systems requires consideration of many alternative designs for their performance, cost and ability to meet stakeholder expectations. Successfully testing, validating and communicating the expected consequences of alternative business practices, processes, protocols and policies requires an objective analytical approach. Agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS), a technique for determining the system-level results of complex, interacting, and often conflicting individual-level decisions, provides such an approach. ABMS of healthcare delivery can provide actionable guidance for decision makers by enabling healthcare experts to define the individual, agent-level rules of operation; allowing them to see how the agent rules play out over time in a detailed real-world context; providing them with the tools to assess the consequences of alternative plans; and giving them a clear method for communicating results to the broader stakeholder community.