Health & Healthcare Systems: Systems Modeling and Analytics

Dear Colleagues,

As we enter the second year of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, healthcare systems have faced systemic challenges in the delivery of both acute and chronic care. Unlike many large engineered technical systems, the healthcare delivery system has developed organically over time, in contrast to engineering methods, such as model-based systems engineering, that supports the design and development of complex systems. Nevertheless, the healthcare delivery system has grown into a complex sociotechnical system with dynamic interactions requiring systems methodologies to elucidate system behavior. The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the need to both synthesize new healthcare delivery models and analyze the current models for needed systemic changes.

Systems modeling supports a deeper understanding of healthcare systems for operational and medical decision-making. While efforts in this area have focused on acute care delivery, there are far less developed methods to support elucidating a systemic understanding of chronic care delivery across time and place. The availability of Big Data, combined with healthcare analytics, supports the enumeration of new system models with health informatics, clinical informatics, and public health informatics.

This Special Issue of Systems invites qualitative and quantitative methods of modeling and analyzing healthcare systems to support a deeper understanding of healthcare system dynamics and behavior, especially for chronic care. We invite theoretical and empirical papers synthesizing or analyzing healthcare systems to support operational and medical decision-making.

Dr. Inas S. Khayal
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-blind 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.