
Eric Lofgren
Assistant Professor
Washington State University
Mathematical modeling of healthcare associated infections (HAIs) and multidrug resistant organisms (MDROs) improves our understanding of pathogens transmission dynamics and provides a framework for evaluating prevention strategies. One way of improving the communication among modelers is by providing a standardized way of describing and reporting models thereby instilling confidence in the reproducibility and generalizability of such models. We updated the Overview, Design concepts, and Details protocol developed by Grimm et al. for describing agent-based models (ABMs) to better align with elements commonly included in healthcare-related ABMs. The MInD-Healthcare framework includes the following nine key elements: 1. Purpose and scope; 2. Entities, state variables, and scales; 3. Initialization; 4. Process overview and scheduling; 5. Input data; 6. Agent interactions and organism transmission; 7. Stochasticity; 8. Submodels; 9. Model verification, calibration, and validation. Our objective is that this framework will improve the quality of evidence generated utilizing these models.
Assistant Professor
Washington State University
Modeling Unit Lead
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Research Data Scientist
RTI International
Research Epidemiologist
RTI International
MIDAS Coordination Center
University of Pittsburgh
A737 Public Health
130 DeSoto Street
Pittsburgh PA 15261