Towards Personalized Explanations for Health Simulations: A Mixed-Methods Framework for Stakeholder-Centric Summarization

Modeling & Simulation (M&S) approaches such as agent-based models hold significant potential to support decision-making activities in health, with recent examples including the adoption of vaccines, and a vast literature on healthy eating behaviors and physical activity behaviors. These models are potentially usable by different stakeholder groups, as they support policy-makers to estimate the consequences of potential interventions and they can guide individuals in making healthy choices in complex environments. However, this potential may not be fully realized because of the models' complexity, which makes them inaccessible to the stakeholders who could benefit the most. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can translate simulation outputs and the design of models into text, current approaches typically rely on one-size-fits-all summaries that fail to reflect the varied informational needs and stylistic preferences of clinicians, policymakers, patients, caregivers, and health advocates. This limitation stems from a fundamental gap: we lack a systematic understanding of what these stakeholders need from explanations and how to tailor them accordingly. To address this gap, we present a step-by-step framework to identify stakeholder needs and guide LLMs in generating tailored explanations of health simulations. Our procedure uses a mixed-methods design by first eliciting the explanation needs and stylistic preferences of diverse health stakeholders, then optimizing the ability of LLMs to generate tailored outputs (e.g., via controllable attribute tuning), and then evaluating through a comprehensive range of metrics to further improve the tailored generation of summaries.