Archimedes, the greatest mathematician of the ancient world, demonstrated how small forces can move great weights by means of a lever. That same principle forms the foundation of the Archimedes Model, a revolutionary health care model that provides the lever to move and manipulate vast amounts of data in a way that simulates reality, improving and accelerating health care decision-making at many points along the health care continuum.
Archimedes, the company, offers consulting services to address organizations' most pressing healthcare questions. Using our hands-on, collaborative approach and the proprietary Archimedes Model, we can help your organization not just find the answers, but find them quickly.
The Archimedes Model: What it is and how it is used
The model creates a virtual reality in which all the important objects and events in the real world have corresponding objects and events in the model's world. When a simulation is run, the objects interact and events occur as they would in the real world.
The Archimedes Model has virtual people with virtual physiologies who get virtual diseases, go to virtual doctors, get virtual tests and treatments and have virtual outcomes. These aspects of health care are found in few, if any, other models. Here is an example of the level of detail captured in the model:
- A simulated patient has pain that reaches a certain threshold and makes a call to a hospital
- A virtual telephone operator directs the call to the appropriate virtual department where the virtual patient's questions are addressed
- The patient goes to a simulated emergency department, is seen by personnel, has tests and receives diagnoses, including treatments that may have mistakes
- All the simulated people have the important organs, including heart, lung, kidneys, liver and pancreas with all their respective parts that carry on their respective functions
- The effects of the physician-patient encounter have ramifications throughout the model's simulated health care system, just as in the real world
In addition, the model operates at levels both deep and broad, encompassing detail that scientists, researchers, clinicians, and administrators consider essential for making decisions: anatomy, physiology, pathology, signs and symptoms, tests and treatments, patient and provider behaviors, care processes, system resources and more.