Evaluating CommunityRx, a Self-Care Innovation for Older Adults, Using Agent-Based Modeling: Collecting and Analyzing Data to Build the Agent Based Model

Detailed Summary

CommunityRx is a health information technology-based innovation that, starting with the patient-health care provider encounter, facilitates self-care coordination for patients, caregivers, and providers. The CommunityRx database interfaces with electronic medical records to provide patients with a "HealtheRx." A HealtheRx is a list of community-based self-care resources tailored to the patients health needs (e.g., a person with diabetes receives information about podiatrists, nutrition classes, and other resources need to manage diabetes). CommunityRx aims to measurably improve health and health care while reducing health care costs especially in underserved health care settings. Specifically, the proposed research aims to 1) evaluate the impact of CommunityRx on health care utilization, cost, health, and patient-centered outcomes for program participants compared to controls; 2) examine the flow and spread of information to and through primary agents including: program participants, community health information experts, healthcare providers, and community-based service providers (businesses and organizations providing self-care resources); and 3) build and use an agent-based model to test the distributed impact, including economic effects, of CommunityRx system adoption on the demonstration area and predict performance over time by conducting experiments that vary assumptions about agent, environment, and population-level characteristics.

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