Quantifying the Resilience of a Healthcare System: Entropy and Network Science Perspectives

Abstract

In this study, we consider the human body and the healthcare system as two complex networks and use theories regarding entropy, requisite variety, and network centrality metrics with resilience to assess and quantify the strengths and weaknesses of healthcare systems. Entropy is used to quantify the uncertainty and variety regarding a patient’s health state. The extent of the entropy defines the requisite variety a healthcare system should contain to be able to treat a patient safely and correctly. We use network centrality metrics to visualize and quantify the healthcare system as a network and assign the strengths and weaknesses of the network and of individual agents in the network. We apply organization design theories to formulate improvements and explain how a healthcare system should adjust to create a more robust and resilient healthcare system that is able to continuously deal with variations and uncertainties regarding a patient’s health, despite possible stressors and disturbances at the healthcare system. In this article, these concepts and theories are explained and applied to a fictive and a real-life example. We conclude that entropy and network science can be used as tools to quantify the resilience of healthcare systems.