Health care: a case of hypercomplexity?

This position paper argues that the lack of take-up of management science (MS) modelling in health care is a particularly severe example of a more general problem for MS, articulated by many authorities. We relate this severity to the extreme complexity of the health care domain, which might be termed ‘hypercomplexity’. We argue that, for a variety of reasons, the health care domain is different to other domains in this respect, and we explore the mechanisms by which hypercomplexity might have inhibited the use of modelling within the domain. We conclude with some tentative suggestions for making progress, including the possibility of taking deliberate steps to reduce health care hypercomplexity.