Obama era grants were filled with the hopes of developing and implementing measures to improve healthcare delivery. Springfield Pediatrician Matt Sadof will present his experience as one of the Principal Investigators for the Massachusetts Alliance for Coordinated Care, a care coordination for children with medical complexity and social fragility funded by Center for Medicaid and Medicare Innovation at two urban centers in Massachusetts Baystate Children’s Hospital and Boston University Medical Center. As a consultative program it supported improved communication between primary care providers and specialists at two geographic locations across the state. Relying on an ambulatory ICU (complex care physician, nurse care coordinators, nutritionists, developmental specialists, social workers and family navigator) it identified and developed systems that would streamline acquisition of services and equipment and housing that would improve the lives of families and decrease morbidity and cost in medically and, long term care costs and increased home care costs. ACO and CHIP uncertainty had lead organizations, state and private insurers reluctant to commit. By paying attention to processes and emphasizing data important to each of their local environments they have been able to transform these programs into functioning programs designed to improve care.

This collection of presentations is from the mini-symposium entitled "Systems Science and Health: Using Analytical Approaches to Evaluate Healthcare Policy Decisions." The focus of this symposium is on systems science applications to health research. Systems science is a collection of analytical computer simulation techniques which are used to evaluate optimize and improve healthcare delivery processes. These techniques account for the complexity of the healthcare system and healthcare processes by modeling nonlinear relationships between variables, the feedback effects, delays and soft variables. The analysis stresses heterogeneity of agents, resistance to change, potential unintended consequences, and behavioral emergence in complex systems. Such models use historical data to simulate the operations of healthcare systems providing an approximation of future outcomes. The presenters will discuss several different types of simulations methods, highlight recent advances, and describe funding opportunities from the National Institutes of Health. Examples from chronic disease patient chains, physician incentive redesign, clinic staffing and Emergency Department redesign will be discussed.