Santa Fe Institute Short Course: Exploring Complexity in Health and Medicine

Complexity and healthcare have always gone hand-in-hand, but for today’s medical and health professionals, ensuring that patients receive optimal care is only getting more challenging.

Whether you’re diagnosing symptoms, predicting -- and preventing -- the spread of disease, or building vital healthcare infrastructure, understanding complex systems has never been more important.

This accessible (no math or science background required), three-day course is designed to give healthcare professionals, faculty, policy-makers and students an intensive introduction to complex systems as they apply to health and medicine. Through lectures, exercises and interactive discussions with prominent SFI faculty and your peers, you’ll learn how complexity science is being used to predict, model and transform medical systems across many disciplines.

Topics covered include: Healthcare as a complex system, Complexity in medicine and disease, Machine learning, and computationally-aided diagnostics.

From tracking the next pandemic to exploring the hidden influence of social networks on public health and using health data to improve patient care, participants will learn to apply complexity thinking to better understand and address their toughest challenges.

Accreditation Statement

This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the accreditation requirements and policies of the New Mexico Medical Society (NMMS) through the joint providership of CHRISTUS St. Vincent Regional Medical Center (CSVRMC) and Santa Fe Institute.  CSVRMC is accredited by the NMMS to provide continuing medical education for physicians.

CSVRMC designates this live activity for a maximum of 15 AMA PRA Category 1 CreditsTM. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.

Ben Althouse, Research Scientist, Institute of Disease Modeling

John Arden, PhD Psychiatry, Kaiser Permanente

Hiroshi Ashikaga, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Elhanan Borenstein Santa Fe Institute, External Faculty; Assistant Professor, University of Washington, Department of Genome Sciences.

David Brailer, CEO of Health Evolution Partners, a health care private equity firm based in San Francisco, California

Timothy G. Buchman, Santa Fe Institute External Faculty, PhD, MD; Founding Director, Emory Center for Critical Care, and Professor of Surgery, Emory University School of Medicine, Department of Surgery, and Emory Center for Critical Care

Christine K. Cassel, MD, President and former CEO of the National Quality Forum now at Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine in Southern California

Joshua Epstein, Santa Fe Institute External Faculty; Professor of Emergency Medicine; Joint appointments: Departments of Economics, Biostatistics, and Environmental Health at Johns Hopkins University; Director, Center for Advanced Modeling in the Social, Behavioral and Health Sciences (CAM) at Johns Hopkins.

Joe Flower, Healthcare speaker, writer, and consultant with clients ranging from the World Health Organization, the Global Business Network, and the U.K. National Health Service, to the majority of state hospital associations in the U.S. as well as many of the provincial associations and ministries in Canada, and an extraordinary variety of other players across.

Ross Hammond, Santa Fe Institute External Faculty; Senior fellow in Economic Studies and Director of the Center on Social Dynamics and Policy, Brookings Institution

Greg LaGana, MD/FACP and Medical Comedian. LaGana also co-founded Pegasus Consulting Associates, a strategic management consulting firm, and ARK Technologies.

Christopher A. Longhurst, Dr. Longhurst leads the creation and execution of a comprehensive information strategy to meet future needs of UC San Diego Health. Dr. Longhurst is also a key faculty member in the Department of Biomedical Informatics in the UC San Diego School of Medicine. Dr. Longhurst was elected a fellow in the prestigious American College of Medical Informatics.

Pilar Ossorio, Dr. Ossorio is Professor of Law and Bioethics where she is on the faculties of the Law School and the Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the Medical School.

Dario Robleto, Dario Robleto is a transdisciplinary artist based in Houston,
He is currently serving as an Artist-in-Residence in Neuroaesthetics at the University of Houston’s Cullen College of Engineering and at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, CA.