RT Book, Section A1 Howell, Michael D. A1 Stevens, Jennifer P. SR Print(0) ID 1167643826 T1 Complexity: Thinking About the Healthcare System as a Living Organism T2 Understanding Healthcare Delivery Science YR 2020 FD 2020 PB McGraw-Hill Education PP New York, NY SN 9781260026481 LK accessmedicine.mhmedical.com/content.aspx?aid=1167643826 RD 2024/03/28 AB As a healthcare delivery scientist, you will ask fundamental questions about whether interventions in healthcare made a difference for your patients and your organization. But how can we evaluate these interventions? The examples in Chapter 1 demonstrated what happens when we make the fundamental and human mistake of taking an oversimplified approach to healthcare. Human beings look for patterns and metaphors to explain large, complex problems. Our very tendency to look for coincidence reflects our natural ability to anchor ourselves onto events that we can easily explain. However, these reductionist biases lead us to either assume the innate utility of our interventions without studying them, or when we do study these interventions, to use designs (such as pre/post comparisons) that may lead us to think that our interventions work when they don’t.