Implementation issues of modeling healthcare problems: Misconceptions and lessons

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the role of modeling and simulation in healthcare domain has seen unprecedented attention from the academic community. So much literature has focused on barriers facing implementation and uptake of modeling and simulation by the healthcare community. This article focuses on this issue and goes beyond that and examines the nature of healthcare problems and the causes of barriers using the concept of wicked problems. There is a clear mismatch between the wicked nature of healthcare problems and the tame approaches proposed by the modeling community. The article concludes that with the existence of such mismatch, implementation cannot be used to measure success, and further suggests guiding principles when developing modeling and simulation approaches to tackle wicked healthcare problems. These are based around redefining the meaning of success, problem profiling, modeling methods, and modeling skills.