Systems View of Health Care

The art of medicine concentrates on diagnosis (finding problems) and treatment (fixing problems). The task of physicians might be described as “find it and fix it.” The find-it/fix-it model exemplifies what engineers call linear thinking. The linear model has been the predominant view of the world since the time of Sir Isaac Newton, who focused his attention on discrete components of the world and assumed that these components operated independently from one another. Many things work in a linear fashion. For a complex machine or organism, linear function means that each component operates independently of the others. The environment receives relatively little attention. Ackoff (1994) explained that the industrial revolution, which began in England during the 18th century, ushered in new ways of thinking that dominated nearly all fields for several centuries. This thinking was dominated by three concepts: reductionism, analysis, and mechanism.