Research pursued by the Department of Health and Welfare Services is concerned with policy research on various systems within the fi eld of health and welfare, as well as human resource development.
Health care systems consist of diverse elements: health and welfare services administration, hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, nursing care facilities, home medical care units, home nursing care units, and so forth. All these elements, however, are united in a common purpose: that of maintaining and improving people’s health.
In general, size is not the only characteristic that diff erentiates one system from another. Systems can also be characterized as mechanical or adaptive. In a mechanical system, the components exhibit a predictable response to any given stimulus, and the system is amenable to application of standardized regulation. On the other hand, the components of an adaptive system are exceedingly diverse. Including the human factor, there is strong interaction among all the component elements of the system. In such a system, it is important to build” an organization that learns.”
Health care systems exhibit characteristics of both categories: the mechanical and the adaptive, but the adaptive overwhelmingly predominates. To improve the performance of a health care system, the characteristics of mechanical and adaptive systems need to be understood; and after that, the two different systems need to be managed simultaneously and in the proper way.