Formulating policy for public health action requires designing solutions within a complex adaptive system-of-systems
Public Health systems are:
- Complex due to the large number of interdependencies and non-linear interactions among autonomous agents, such as individuals, health care organizations, and governmental agencies
- Adaptive in that the behaviors of individuals, organizations, and diseases are highly responsive to the behaviors of other such agents, as well as to hazards and natural disasters
- System-of-systems structure is evident in their ability to be recursively decomposed into collections of interacting components, generally to an arbitrarily low level of detail
Ultimately, designed solutions (public health care actions) must be shown to be robust to the uncertainties inherent within the CASoS.
