Health Care Management is an area where system dynamics has been extensively and successfully applied. Some of the models developed have dealt with the patience flow and the waiting lists and how various policies impact the waiting time for receiving healthcare. Health care systems are very complex with unpredictable beheviors due to the interaction of many complex agents. How do you use the limited supply of hospital beds, physicians and nurses to provide health care to a growing population? How do you staff an emergency care facility to minimize cost and maximize the level of service?
Another common application of system dynamics is related to the way epidemics spread and how a given policy can influence the speed of this spread. Policy makers are interested in finding the most cost-effective way for controlling the spread of deseases even before they become epidemics.
In these applications the models are built on some form of a diffusion model shown below:
A typical result for a simulation like this is shown below:
