Facts

Contact person:
Fabian Lorig
Financer:
  • Crafoordska Stiftelsen
Responsible at MaU:
Fabian Lorig
External project members:
  • Bertilla Fabris (MAU)
Time frame:
01 September 2024 - 30 June 2025
Faculty/department:
Research environment :
Research subject:
Website:
Crafoord.se

Project description

The modification of healthcare policies has the potential to deeply impact people’s lives, especially in the case of changes to organ donation and transplantation protocols. To minimize risks to individual health and societal welfare, policy changes can be simulated before implementation. This allows policy actors to efficiently conduct what-if analyses in a virtual environment and to investigate the potential effects and consequences of different policy changes without the risk of harming peoples’ well-being.

A major factor that needs to be considered when simulating the effects of policies is the behaviour of the humans that are affected by it. Agent-Based Social Simulations (ABSS) is a simulation paradigm that explicitly models human behaviour and that has proven its great potential to facilitate policy design. ABSS make use of artificial populations of individuals (so-called agents), thus, having the ability to capture higher levels of complexity, and are therefore well-suited to model complex healthcare systems.

In a previous research project, the technical requirements as well as the social, legal, and ethical aspects (ELSA) for using ABSS to inform organ donation policymaking have been investigated. Based on these results, the goal of this project is to develop an ABSS model representing the organ donation and transplantation system of Sweden and evaluate its feasibility as a tool for policy-making assistance.