Complex Adaptive Systems Approaches for Health and Well-Being

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to invite you to contribute to this Special Issue on “Complex Adaptive Systems Approaches for Health and Well-Being”.

Healthcare systems worldwide face unprecedented challenges that demand innovative conceptual frameworks and methodologies. Traditional reductionist approaches often fail to capture the dynamic, interconnected nature of health systems, where multiple agents, including patients, providers, organizations, and communities, interact in non-linear ways to produce emergent outcomes. Complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory offers a transformative paradigm for understanding health and well-being by emphasizing relationships, feedback loops, self-organization, adaptation, and emergent behaviors across multiple scales.

This Special Issue aims to advance the theoretical understanding and practical application of CAS approaches to pressing health challenges. The scope encompasses chronic disease management, mental health service delivery, population health interventions, healthcare system resilience, and well-being promotion. By publishing in Systems, a journal dedicated to interdisciplinary systems research and modeling, this Special Issue directly aligns with the journal's mission to advance systems thinking, complexity science, and systems engineering across diverse domains. Healthcare represents a critical application domain where systems approaches can address real-world complexity, making this topic highly relevant to the journal's readership of systems researchers, practitioners, and policymakers.

This Special Issue seeks to bridge theory and practice by showcasing rigorous applications of complexity science methods to health and well-being. We welcome contributions employing systems thinking frameworks, agent-based modeling, network analysis, system dynamics, and other computational and analytical methods that illuminate how complex interactions produce health outcomes. Research addressing healthcare system resilience, adaptive capacity, transformative change, and the integration of technical and social dimensions of health systems is particularly encouraged.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include but are not limited to the following:

• Systems thinking frameworks for health policy and interventions.
• Agent-based models of health behaviors, disease transmission, and healthcare delivery.
• Network analysis of healthcare systems, patient pathways, and care coordination.
• Complex systems approaches to mental health and well-being.
• Resilience and adaptive capacity in health systems.
• Population health as complex adaptive systems.
• Multi-level modeling of social determinants of health.
• Self-organization and emergence in health systems.
• System dynamics models of healthcare resource allocation and planning.
• Complexity science methods for health equity and disparities.
• Integration of primary care and specialist services using CAS principles.
• Healthcare transformation and organizational change through a complexity lens.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Dr. Panagiotis Katrakazas
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the Special Issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Systems is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.