Main description:

This idea-packed resource takes systems and complexity sciences out of blue-sky territory and into the concrete world of contemporary healthcare practice. Beginning with a new reframing of health and illness, its chapters redesign traditional disease-centered models of care into modern, health-centered-and patient-centered-health service systems. The approaches shown here combine innovation and common sense to recognize and attend to patients' needs across areas including health education and training, information accessibility, health service organization and delivery, and disease in individual context. The variety of solutions applied to this wide spectrum of issues shows the suitability of systems, complexity, and adaptive thinking to the ongoing objectives of making health services more responsive, effective, and equitable.

Highlights of the coverage:

Healthy smoker: an oxymoron? Maybe, but it is more complicated than that

Transforming monitoring and improving care with variability-derived clinical decision support

Linking Gulf War illness to genome instability, somatic evolution, and complex adaptive systems

Complexity of knowledge in primary care: understanding the discipline's requisite knowledge: a bibliometric study

New ways of knowing and researching: integrating complexity into a translational health sciences program

Understanding the emergency department ecosystem using agent-based modelling

Putting Systems and Complexity Sciences into Practice is an inspiring idea book that sill interest health policymakers, health financiers, organizational leaders, healthcare administrators, clinicians, researchers, students, and interested lay readers.

Contents:

Introduction.- Learning: Contemplating the Unexamined Core of Learning Health Systems.-From Clinical Ethics to Big Data Analytics: Applying Systems and Complexity Science to the Care of Hospitalized Patients.- Visualisation in Simulation of Complex Systems in Healthcare.- Social and institutional change in complex health systems: Lessons learned.- The Complex Relationship Between Health Outcomes and Health Factors in the Pacific Northwest.- Pitfalls in Identifying High Performers in Diabetes Overtreatment: Positive Deviance may be neither Positive nor Deviant. -Why the Interdisciplinary Team Approach Works: Insights from Complexity Science.- The multiple networks of multimorbidity.- Changing the Medical Paradigm: Why the Allostatic Model Makes More Sense.- New Ways of Knowing and Researching: Integrating Systems and Complexity into a Translational Health Sciences PhD.- Transforming Monitoring and Improving Care with Variability-derived Clinical Decision Support.- The Impact of Relational Coordination on Collaboration, Care, and Thinking.