Developing Systems Thinking Skills using Healthcare as a Case Study

This paper presents the use of the U.S. Healthcare Systems as an application example for a large sociotechnical systems architecture in a class on system architecture fundamentals. Although the complexity of the U.S. healthcare system is too great to support detailed analysis in a class setting, it is excellent system to introduce concepts such as sensemaking, heuristics, boundary setting, analysis of context, and strategy definition. The exercise starts with a set of narratives that have been selected to introduce a breadth of perspectives to the students. From these, the students select a set of relevant heuristics that guide architectural descriptions. In a facilitated exercise the students brainstorm and document the structure and relationships in the system guided by selected long-term outcomes. The knowledge gained sets the stage for a more detailed study of an existing healthcare system architecture such as an electronic patient records system, or a complex set of medical equipment. The use of specific systems thinking tools in this process leads the students to a more holistic view of the healthcare system-of-systems architecture. The paper presents the case study, the systems thinking tools employed, and observed impacts on the mindset of the students in a professional Masters degree program in Systems Engineering.