In affiliation with the 9th European Public Health (EPH) Conference, Vienna, 9-12 Nov 2016, at 10 Nov, an evening colloquium took place in the Bertalanffy Center (BCSSS).
The topic was: „Modeling health impacts for decision-making – On status and perspectives“

This  workshop was organized as a joint venture between BCSSS (Mag. S. Blachfellner, Prof. F.Tretter), a Public Health Group working on Health Impact Quantification (Prof. R. Fehr, Prof. C. Hornberg, U Bielefeld; Prof. J.P. Mackenbach, EMC Rotterdam) and the EUPHA Section on Health Impact Assessment (President Dr. O. Mekel).

The main question was, how to proceed in the field of estimating and predicting the impact of health-related interventions on the burden of disease. This is important for demonstrating the relevance of public health perspectives for policy makers. In this context, basic epistemic issues were raised: How appropriate are the epidemiological data sets that are available for modelling, what kind of procedures of model building are appropriate and have transdisciplinary value, what kind of software is user-friendly in this context, can approaches of “Big Data” mitigate the challenging deficiencies of theory in medicine and Public Health, etc. From the view point of systems science (BCSSS), it was suggested that an explicit methodology and epistemology of (systemic) modeling (contextual modeling, modular modeling, expert-based parameter estimations, visualizations etc.) should be worked out in order to increase the transparency when translating verbal models into simulation designs in transdisciplinary research contexts.  Additionally, the basic need to construct exploratory dynamic models was stressed. During the workshop, the individual methodological positions were presented by the participants who met again at the European Public Health Conference.
Please find here slides of all 8 presentations.

Finally, it was suggested that a workshop could be held at the Conference of the ISSS in Vienna in July 2017.