Table 1 Glossary of terms
From: The three numbers you need to know about healthcare: the 60-30-10 Challenge
Term | Definitions |
|---|---|
Complex adaptive system | A dynamic, self-similar collectivity of interacting agents and their artefacts with emergent behaviours and characterised by nonlinearity, e.g. a large hospital. |
Complexity | The behaviour embedded in highly composite systems or models of systems with large numbers of interacting components (e.g. agents, artefacts and groups); their ongoing, repeated interactions create local rules and rich, collective behaviours. |
Complexity science | A discipline drawing on the study of systems sciences, accounting for and describing the core features and behaviours of different kinds of complex adaptive systems. |
Emergence | Behaviours that are built from smaller or simpler entities, the characteristics or properties of which arise through the interactions of those smaller or simpler entities; the larger entities are one level up in scale and manifest as structures, patterns, properties, or collective behaviours. |
Learning health system | A system at the crossroads of people and information systems—i.e. one that is ‘sociotechnical’—and that enables virtuous learning cycles through an underlying information infrastructure. Through the implementation of virtuous learning cycles, a learning system is informed by evidence and actionable data in ‘real-time’ and creates the foundations of a system capable of meeting systems-wide, clinically oriented, and patient-relevant delivery targets. |
Network | An interlocking web of relationships or connections at varying levels of scale in a system; the agents or artefacts are the nodes and the relationships between them are lines or vectors, which together describe the structure of the interactions of the network’s membership. |