Page - 11 - in Applied Interdisciplinary Theory in Health Informatics - Knowledge Base for Practitioners

General System Theory and the Use of Owen JOHNSON a,1 a School of Computing, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK Abstract. General System Theory was proposed in the post-war period as a unifying framework for interdisciplinary science based on the idea that systems have a set of similar properties and characteristics regardless of discipline. General System Theory laid the foundations for talking about things in terms of systems, many of its terms are now embedded in everyday language and it underpins a broad range of systems approaches and systems thinking. This chapter will describe the key elements of the original General System Theory (GST) including control, feedback, emergence, holism and the notion of a hierarchy of systems within systems. It will review the origin, content and foundational role of systems theory in biology, medicine, computer science, organizational theory and its central contribution to health informatics. In recent years, healthcare organizations have been encouraged to see themselves within the context of learning health systems (LHS) and to use emerging big data analytics techniques such as process mining to develop better, integrated and personalized pathways of care for patients. We use GST to reflect on these emerging approaches through a discussion and case study on recent work in urgent and emergency care. Our aim is to trace the influence of GST through emerging LHS ideas and use the framework of GST to reflect on the opportunities and limitations of our process mining approach. In particular, we will reflect on how GST can explain successes and failure in the application of process mining to care pathways and the challenges and opportunities ahead. Keywords. General System Theory, Learning Health Systems, Process Mining Learning objectives After reading this chapter, the reader will be able to: 1. Review general system theory and the rich set of perspectives it brings to the understanding of health informatics in modern organizations. 2. Illustrate the application of general system theory to current challenges in healthcare. 3. Use general system theory as a framework to review data driven approaches to care pathway improvement with a specific focus on process mining. 4. Use general system theory as a perspective to reflect on the opportunities for learning health systems that focus on care pathway improvement. 1 Corresponding Author: Owen Johnson, E-mail: o.a.johnson@leeds.ac.uk Process Mining to Improve Care Pathways Applied Interdisciplinary Theory in Health Informatics P. Scott et al. (Eds.) © 2019 The authors and IOS Press. This article is published online with Open Access by IOS Press and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0). doi:10.3233/SHTI190107 11