Agent-based modeling (ABM) is a modeling and simulation paradigm well-suited to social systems where agents interact and have some degree of autonomy. In their most basic sense, ABMs consist of agents (generally, individuals) interacting in an environment according to a set of behavioural rules. The foundational premise and the conceptual depth of ABM is that simple rules of individual behaviour will aggregate to illuminate complex and/or emergent group-level phenomena that are not specifically encoded by the modeler and that cannot be predicted or explained by the agent-level rules. In essence, ABM has the potential to reveal a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. In this thesis, ABMs have been utilized as a modeling framework for three specific healthcare applications, including: • the development of an ABM of an emergency department within a hospital allowing the modeling of contact-based infectious diseases such as influenza, and simulating various mitigation strategies; • the development of an ABM to model the effectiveness of a real-time location system (RTLS) using radio frequency identification (RFID) in an emergency department, used for patient tracking as one measure of hospital efficiency; and, • the development of an ABM to test strategies for disaster preparedness (high volume, high risk patients) using a fictitious case of zombies in an emergency department. Although each ABM was purposeful and meaningful for its custom application, each ABM also represented an iteration toward the development of a generic ABM framework. Finally, a thorough critique of ABMs and the modifications required to create a more robust framework are provided. / February 2016

Aging population is becoming a problem in a lot of countries, being Swedenone of them, and that is leading society to a lack of the necessary peopleto take care of all the elderly people. The CareIP device, an alarm systemfor the elderly people, with which they are able to ask for assistive help incase they need it, has been used all over Sweden for a while now. In thisthesis, a simulation model has been built in order to study how this caregiving system works in the specic case of Vaxjo. This model can be usedto simulate real situations and prevent certain problems as it could be thelack or excess of resources, long waiting times or unexpected increase on thenumber of alarms, which could lead to critical situations on a emergencyhealthcare system.