Complexity in Health Group

It has been a while since my last post. My research colleagues and I have been busy creating a new research center for studying health and health care via the tools of complexity science. It is called, appropriately enough, the Complexity in Health Group. Much thanks to Michael Ball and Kenny Carvalho for their incredible viking work.

CHECK OUT THE SITE: cch.ashtabula.kent.edu

HERE IS A QUICK OVERVIEW OF THE CENTER'S MISSION STATEMENT AND AREAS OF RESEARCH

The Complexity in Health Group (CHG) promotes the application of complexity science to the study of health and health care through a cross-disciplinary program of teaching, training and research. The CHG’s application of complexity science includes complex systems thinking, computational modeling, network analysis, data mining, and qualitative and historical approaches to complexity. The CHG is specifically committed to collaborating with health care centers and practitioners in Ashtabula County, Ohio; and to students and faculty at Kent State University. The CHG is affiliated with the Robert S. Morrison Health and Science Building, Kent State University at Ashtabula. Other affiliations we are working on include Kent State University’s College of Public Health and the Kent-Summa Institute for Clinical and Translational Research.

The Group will have several foci:

• Becoming a leading international research center in the application of complexity science to the study of health and health care;
• Generating revenue for our campus through extramural funding;
• Fostering interdisciplinary research with faculty at the Ashtabula campus, as well as Kent State University and other universities;
• Developing our undergraduate student population’s skills in science, technology and mathematics in application to health and health care, particularly public health;
• Developing collaborative research relations with local health agencies and businesses to promote the public health of Ashtabula County.

The current topics of the CHG are:

• Studying how communities, as complex systems, impact residential health, particularly in disadvantaged communities;
• Developing new tools for measuring and teaching medical students, residents, and clinical faculty about the challenges of medical professionalism in today’s complex health care system, both nationally and globally;
• Using network analysis to research how medical learning environments shape nurses and physicians;
• Studying how public educational systems impact the health and wellbeing of children.
• Developing the SACS Toolkit, a new method for studying health and health care from a complexity science perspective.