Complexity in Health Care Systems
Shmuel Penchas · Complexus · 2003
Health care systems are complex systems with many independent agents each interacting with the others, occasionally inducing changes in some, and creating complex adaptive systems containing emergent property potential. Amongst the independent agents in health care systems there are language, structure, logic and social order. Each is fraught with fundamental problems, leading to famous paradoxes. Some of these parameters are initial conditions in complex adaptive systems, which can but do not have to be sensitive to changes in initial conditions – leading to future significant effects. It is still impossible to predict the appearance of emergent properties from independent agent behavior, and evolving health care systems can thus become undesirable and fail. Much of all this applies to other social systems. However, there are systems with foreseeable behavior – uniform, repetitive and nested ones. These are simple systems, with reducible computations for predicting their future development. In health care systems, one needs to reduce unpredictable developmental failure by emulating such simple systems through the implementation of their basic qualities.