Main description:

Population health is complex and multileveled, encompassing dynamic interactions between cells, societies, and everything in between. Our typical approach to studying population health, however, remains oriented around a reductionist approach to conceptualizing, empirically analyzing, and intervening to improve population health. The trouble is that interventions founded on simplifying a complex world often do not work, sometimes yielding failure or, even worse,
harm. The difficult truth is that "silver bullet" health science often fails, and understanding these failures can help us improve our approach to health science, and, ultimately, population health.

SYSTEMS SCIENCE AND POPULATION HEALTH employs principles from across a range of sciences to refine the way we understand population health. By augmenting traditional analytic approaches with new tools like machine learning, microsimulation, and social network analysis, population health can be studied as a dynamic and complex system. This allows us to understand population health as a complex whole, offering new insights and perspectives that stand to improve the health of the public. This text
offers the first educational and practical guide to this forward-thinking approach.

Comprising 17 chapters from the vanguard of population health, epidemiology, computer science, and medicine, this book offers a three-part introduction to the subject:

DT An intellectual and conceptual history of systems science as it intersects with population health
DT Concise, introductory overviews of important and emerging methodological tools in systems science, including systems dynamics, agent-based modeling, microsimulation, social network analysis, and machine-learning-all with relevant examples drawn from population health literature
DT An exploration of future implications for systems science and its applications to our understanding of population health issues

For researchers, students, and practitioners, SYSTEMS SCIENCE AND POPULATION HEALTH redefines many of the foundational elements of how we understand population health. It should not be missed.

Contents:

1.Introduction
Abdulrahman M. El-Sayed

SECTION 1: Simplicity, complexity and population health

2. Reductionism at the dawn of population health
Kristin Heitman

3. Wrong answers: when simple interpretations create complex problems
David S. Fink, Katherine M. Keyes

4. Complexity: the evolution towards 21st century science
Anton Palma, David W. Lounsbury

5. Systems thinking in population health research and policy
Stephen Mooney

SECTION 2: Methods in systems population health

6. Generation of systems maps: mapping complex systems of population health
Helen de Pinho

7. Systems dynamics models
Eric Lofgren

8. Agent-based modeling
Brandon Marshall

9. Microsimulation
Sanjay Basu

10. Social network analysis: the ubiquity of social networks
and their importance for population health
Douglas A. Luke, Amar Dhand, Bobbi J. Carothers

SECTION 3: Systems science towards a consequential population health

11. Machine learning
James H. Faghmous

12. Systems science and the social determinants of population health
David S. Fink, Katherine M. Keyes, Magdalena Cerda

13. Systems approaches to understanding how the environment
influences population health and population health interventions
Melissa Tracy

14. Systems of behavior and population health
Mark Orr, Kathryn Ziemer, Daniel Chen

15. Systems under your skin
Karina Standahl Olsen, Hege Bovelstad, Eiliv Lund

16. Frontiers in health modeling
Nathaniel Osgood

17. Systems science and population health
Abdulrahman M. El-Sayed, Sandro Galea