What Can Players Learn?
The game integrates data and findings from earlier studies on factors affecting health system performance (see below). Because its broad sweep, most variables are defined at a high level of aggregation. For example, the game does not consider individual types of disease or injury, but rather combines them all into a single measure of prevalence based on national surveys. In general, quantification of the prototype model is based on a variety of publicly available data from the Census, Vital Statistics, national health surveys, the National Health Expenditures database, and studies from the professional literature on health care utilization and programmatic impact. We expect to refine some concepts and estimates as we gather more information from research studies and from subject matter experts, but aggregated representations will always be necessary to make the analysis tractable and consonant with available data.
