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.

This visionary reframing of health and healthcare uses a complexity science approach to building healthcare systems that are accessible, effective, and prepared for change and challenges. Its holistic map for understanding the human organism emphasizes the interconnectedness of the individual's physical, psychological, cognitive, and sociocultural functioning. Applications of this approach are described in primary, specialist, and emergency care and at the organizational and policy levels, from translating findings to practice, to problem solving and evaluation. In this model, the differences between disease and illness and treating illness and restoring health are not mere wordplay, but instead are robust concepts reflecting real-world issues and their solutions. Based on the Proceedings of the 1st International Conference of Systems and Complexity for Healthcare, topics covered include: * Coping with complexity and uncertainty: insights from studying epidemiology in family medicine * Anticipation in complex systems: potential implications for improving safety and quality in healthcare * Monitoring variability and complexity at the bedside * Viewing mental health through the lens of complexity science * Ethical complexities in systems healthcare: what care and for whom? * The value of systems and complexity thinking to enable change in adaptive healthcare organizations supported by informatics * If the facts don't fit the theory, change the theory: implications for health system reform The Value of Systems and Complexity Sciences for Healthcare will interest and inspire health and disease researchers, health professionals, health care planners, health system financiers, health system administrators, health services administrators, health professional educators, and, last but not least, current and future patients.

This forward-looking volume challenges professionals and interested lay readers to reconsider our ways of looking at health and wellness, illness and disease, and the goals of health/healthcare systems. Reframing health systems as complex adaptive systems, the book identifies health care as a central aspect of social care and security for all people, particularly the most vulnerable. From there, the author outlines necessary organizational, design, medical, and community steps toward building health systems that view and practice health care as a human right and can produce optimum care in the long term. And extensive illustrations display effective collaborative problem solving within these systems, in both intriguing theoretical models and the real world. Highlights of the coverage: * Systems and complexity thinking in health and health care * Redesign based on "first principles" * Redesign from an organizational perspective * Working together effectively and efficiently to achieve a common purpose * Analyzing "the workings" of health systems as complex adaptive systems * Person-centered, equitable, and sustainable health systems: achieving the goal Health System Redesign brings a voice and a vision to the most pressing problems in healthcare service delivery, and offers new goals and purpose to health policymakers, health financiers, organizational leaders, clinicians, and concerned members of the local community

This detailed volume illustrates the transformative nature of systems and complexity sciences for practice, research, education, and health system organization. Researchers highlight the fresh perspectives and novel approaches offered by these interdisciplinary fields in addressing the complexities of global, national, and community health challenges in the 21st century. With the implications that these emerging fields hold for health still relatively underexplored, researchers from a wide variety of disciplines, including physiological, social, environmental, clinical, prevention, educational, organizational, finance, and policy domains, aim in this book to suggest future directions in health care and highlight recent advances in basic and clinical physiology, education, policy-making, and leadership. Among the topics discussed: Impact of genomic heterogeneity on bio-emergent properties Harnessing Big Data to improve health services Decision-making of women in violent relationships Co-producing healthcare interventions A socio-ecological solution to physician burnout Embracing Complexity in Health: The Transformation of Science, Practice, and Policy is a highly relevant resource to practitioners in the field, students, instructors, and policy makers, and also should find an engaged audience among health and disease researchers, healthcare planners, health system financiers, health system administrators, health services administrators, health professional educators, and other health professionals. The trans- and interdisciplinary natures of health and health care are fostering a broad discourse amongst all concerned with improving patient care in an equitable and sustainable way.

This book is an introduction to health care as a complex adaptive system, a system that feeds back on itself. The first section introduces systems and complexity theory from a science, historical, epistemological, and technical perspective, describing the principles and mathematics. Subsequent sections build on the health applications of systems science theory, from human physiology to medical decision making, population health and health services research. The aim of the book is to introduce and expand on important population health issues from a systems and complexity perspective, highlight current research developments and their implications for health care delivery, consider their ethical implications, and to suggest directions for and potential pitfalls in the future.

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.

This forward-looking volume challenges professionals and interested lay readers to reconsider our ways of looking at health and wellness, illness and disease, and the goals of health/healthcare systems. Reframing health systems as complex adaptive systems, the book identifies health care as a central aspect of social care and security for all people, particularly the most vulnerable. From there, the author outlines necessary organizational, design, medical, and community steps toward building health systems that view and practice health care as a human right and can produce optimum care in the long term. And extensive illustrations display effective collaborative problem solving within these systems, in both intriguing theoretical models and the real world. Highlights of the coverage: * Systems and complexity thinking in health and health care * Redesign based on "first principles" * Redesign from an organizational perspective * Working together effectively and efficiently to achieve a common purpose * Analyzing "the workings" of health systems as complex adaptive systems * Person-centered, equitable, and sustainable health systems: achieving the goal Health System Redesign brings a voice and a vision to the most pressing problems in healthcare service delivery, and offers new goals and purpose to health policymakers, health financiers, organizational leaders, clinicians, and concerned members of the local community

This visionary reframing of health and healthcare uses a complexity science approach to building healthcare systems that are accessible, effective, and prepared for change and challenges. Its holistic map for understanding the human organism emphasizes the interconnectedness of the individual's physical, psychological, cognitive, and sociocultural functioning. Applications of this approach are described in primary, specialist, and emergency care and at the organizational and policy levels, from translating findings to practice, to problem solving and evaluation. In this model, the differences between disease and illness and treating illness and restoring health are not mere wordplay, but instead are robust concepts reflecting real-world issues and their solutions. Based on the Proceedings of the 1st International Conference of Systems and Complexity for Healthcare, topics covered include: * Coping with complexity and uncertainty: insights from studying epidemiology in family medicine * Anticipation in complex systems: potential implications for improving safety and quality in healthcare * Monitoring variability and complexity at the bedside * Viewing mental health through the lens of complexity science * Ethical complexities in systems healthcare: what care and for whom? * The value of systems and complexity thinking to enable change in adaptive healthcare organizations supported by informatics * If the facts don't fit the theory, change the theory: implications for health system reform The Value of Systems and Complexity Sciences for Healthcare will interest and inspire health and disease researchers, health professionals, health care planners, health system financiers, health system administrators, health services administrators, health professional educators, and, last but not least, current and future patients.

This work contains foreword by Ian R McWhinney, Emeritus Professor of General Practice, Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry, Centre for Studies in Family Medicine University of Western Ontario, Canada. This ground-breaking book encourages a re-focus on the subjective and social nature of health and illness. It helps healthcare professionals find fresh perspectives to assist patients, many of whom are threatened by and lost in a healthcare system dominated by diseases and procedures. The book takes a whole systems approach to primary care, incorporating new developments, social aspects, critical discourse, international perspectives, and the history and philosophy of medicine. It is a stimulating and inspiring read for general practitioners and other primary healthcare professionals, undergraduate and postgraduate medical students, healthcare educators, academics, and primary care researchers. Healthcare policy makers and shapers will value its lucid account of complex issues. 'Joachim Sturmberg has written an important book, which I sincerely hope the reformers of our health care system will study carefully. It is also a riveting read. With great erudition and strong arguments, Sturmberg lays out a plan which leads to a goal to which we all aspire - a health care system based on primary care and primary health care which expresses the historic values of medicine and adapts itself to the complexity of modern medicine. A must read for anyone who has the interests of primary care at heart.' - Ian R McWhinney, in the Foreword.