Embracing Complexity in Health

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.

Joachim P. Sturmberg, MBBS, DORACOG, MFM, PhD, FRACGP, is conjoint associate professor of General Practice in the School of Medicine and Public Health, Faculty of Health and Medicine, at The University of Newcastle in Newcastle, Australia. He is a graduate of Lübeck Medical School in Germany, where he also completed his PhD. Since 1989, Sturmberg has worked in an urban group practice in the Central Coast of New South Wales. His research focuses on understanding the complex interconnected features of person-centered healthcare. Together with his collaborators, Sturmberg proposes that a truly functional health system ought to always focus on the needs of the person/patient across all domains affecting health -- local health delivery services, local and regional social and economic infrastructure and services, as well as in all portfolios at the national policy levels. These complex interdependent features of a person-centered healthcare system are described by the health vortex model. Sturmberg's current research focuses on operationalizing the health vortex model, integrating the physiology of health with health care delivery, the socioeconomic domains affecting health, and the impact of policy decisions on health and the healthcare system. Together with Howard Federoff, Sturmberg organized the 1st International Conference of System and Complexity for Healthcare. Sturmberg and Carmel Martin are joint co-editors in chief of the Forum on Systems and Complexity in Medicine and Healthcare as part of the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice. Sturmberg co-chairs the Complexities in Health Special Interest Group in WONCA (World Organization of National Colleges, Academies and Academic Associations of General Practitioners/Family Physicians) with Martin and Jim Price.

Introduction.- Max Planck's Challenge for Health, Health Care and the Healthcare System.- Fail Small, Fail Often: An Outsider's View of Physiologic Complexity.- Physiology.- A Puzzling Question: How Can Different Phenotypes Possibly Have Indistinguishable Disease Symptoms?.- Complexity Sciences Dramatically Improve Biomarker Research and Use.- Analyzing Complex Medical Image Information: Convolution versus Wavelets in a Neural Net.- The Mechanisms of How Genomic Heterogeneity Impacts Bio-Emergent Properties: The Challenges for Precision Medicine.- Health Care.- The Health System Quartet: Four Basic Systems-Cure, Care, Heal, and Deal-to Foster the Co-Production of Sustained Health.- Humans and Big Data-New Hope? Harnessing the Power of Person-Centered Data Analytics.- Is Decision-making of Women Concerning their Violent Relationships Truly Nonlinear... and Why Is That?.- Co-Producing Health Care Interventions: Transforming Transdisciplinary Research to Develop Health Care Service to Meet the Needs of Patients with Complex Problems.- Education & Leadership.- Coordinated Tension: The "Secret Sauce" to Enable Decision Making in a Global Health Complex Adaptive System.- A Systems Perspective for Measuring Features of Transdisciplinary Knowledge Producing Teams (TDKPTs).- How and Why Effective Leaders Construct and Evolve Structural Attractors to Overcome Spatial, Temporal and Social Complexity.- Physician Burnout: A U.S. Public Health Crisis in Need of a Socio-Ecological Solution.- Health Systems & Policy.- Organisational Relativity-Changing Our Perspective on Health and Healthcare.- A Systems Model of HIT Induced Complexity.- Salutogenesis Revisited.- Disappointment-Driven System-Improvement in Healthcare.- A Study on the Modeling of Obesity. The Programme.