Abstract for: Simulating the Mechanism of Empowering People through Health Education and Its Effect on Decreasing Cost

Systematic approach is an appropriate formulated method for analysis of the components that have cause and effect relations and logical infrastructure. Causal loops enable the user to easily communicate with the system feedback and assumptions. In this paper, a simulation model is built for the mechanism of empowering people through educating and informing health knowledge and its effect on reducing the cost of health system is designed using systems dynamics. For this purpose, the literature review and semi-structured interviews with experts were conducted and factors influencing on reducing health system costs by increasing the level of knowledge through educating and informing of health knowledge were identified. Then the cause and effect model and flow model were simulated and performed by software Vensim. The results of simulation indicated that the costs of the health system are increasingly rising that after the implementation of education and information mechanism of health knowledge, the increasing trend of costs is balanced. The simulated model in this article displays the importance of empowering individuals and transforming society from a treatment-based community into an individual-based community in which the costs of health system will be reduced with implementation of education and information mechanism of health knowledge.