Design of an ICT Tool for Decision Making in Social and Health Policies

Abstract

The governance requires technical support regarding the complexity in deciding health policies to assist people who require long-term care. Long-term care policies require the use of ICT simulation tools that can provide policy makers with the option of going into a decision theatre and virtually knowing the consequences of different policies prior to finally determining the real policy to be adopted. In this sense, there is an absence of simulation tools for decision making about long-term care policies. In this chapter, the authors propose the foundations and guidelines of SSIMSOWELL, a new scalable, multiagent simulation tool that increases the prediction capacity of governance in the long term care policies, improving the decision making in short, medium, and large term in different European regions. The simulation tool implements a previously validated Social Sustainability Model (SSM). The main goal of SSIMSOWELL is the prediction of policy impacts and the development of new governance models, since it increases the budgetary efficiency and the sustainability of long term policies. In addition, it improves the capacity of policy makers in modelling, planning, and evaluating social-health policies at different scales, ranges, and times in the European Union.