A network frame offers a promising transdisciplinary tool for understanding complex health and health care system problems like suicide

Abstract

As health and health care systems continue to face massive challenges from local to global well-being, understanding the processes that lead to improvement or deterioration in human health has embraced a broad range of forces from genes to national cultures. Despite the many efforts to deploy a common framework that captures diverse drivers at scale, the common missing element is the absence of a flexible mechanism that can guide research within and across levels. This hinders both the cumulation of knowledge and the development of a scientific foundation for multiplex interventions. However, studies across disciplines using a wide variety of methods and measures have converged on "connectedness" as crucial to understanding how factors operate in the health space. More formally, a focus on the critical role of the network structure and content of key elements and how they interact, rather than just on the elements themselves, offers both a generalized theory of active factors within levels and the potential to theorize interactions across levels. One critical contemporary health crisis, suicide, is deployed to illustrate the Network Embedded Symbiome Framework. The wide range of health and health care research where networks have been implicated supports its potential but also cautions against inevitable limits that will require creative theorizing and data harmonization to move forward.

Keywords: complex systems; health; health care; networks.

Fig. 1.

Theoretical predictive plane of network effects on health, disease, and health care. (Reprinted from ref. with permission from Emerald Publishing Limited.)

Fig. 2.

The NES framework for health and health care.

Fig. 3.

Network archetypes in historical and potentially individual contexts.