The complexity, M. Mitchell Waldrop describes a vision of complexity via:

• Rich interactions that allow a system to undergo spontaneous self-organization
• Systems that are adaptive
  
• More predictability than chaotic systems by bringing order and chaos into
  
• Balance at the edge of chaos

of the health care network

Summary

• Is deeply embedded in the US nation state. It reflects the conflict between two opposing visions for the US: high tax with safety net or low tax without.  The emergence of a parasitic elite supported by tax policy, further constrains the choices available to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the network.  
• The US is optimized to sell its citizens dangerous levels of: salt, sugar, cigarettes, guns, light, cell phones, opioids, costly education, global travel, antibacterials, formula, foods including endocrine disrupters;
  
• Accepting the US controlled global supply chain's offered goods & services results in: debt, chronic stress is a multi-faceted condition reflecting high cortisol levels.  Dr. Robert Sapolsky's studies of baboons indicate that stress helps build readiness for fight or flight.  As these actions occur the levels of cortisol return to the baseline rate.  A stressor is anything that disrupts the regular homeostatic balance.  The stress response is the array of neural and endocrine changes that occur to respond effectively to the crisis and reestablish homeostasis. 
  
  • The short term response to the stressor
    
  • activates the amygdala which: Stimulates the brain stem resulting in inhibition of the parasympathetic nervous system and activation of the sympathetic nervous system with the hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine deployed around the body, Activates the PVN which generates a cascade resulting in glucocorticoid secretion to: get energy to the muscles with increased blood pressure for a powerful response.  The brain's acuity and cognition are stimulated.  The immune system is stimulated with beta-endorphin and repair activities curtail.  But when the stressor is
    
  • long term: loneliness, debt; and no action is necessary, or possible, long term damage ensues.  Damage from such stress may only occur in specific situations: Nuclear families coping with parents moving in.  Sustained stress provides an evolved amplifier of a position of dominance and status.  It is a strategy in female aggression used to limit reproductive competition.  Sustained stress:
    
  • Stops the frontal cortex from ensuring we do the harder thing, instead substituting amplification of the individual's propensity for risk-taking and impairing risk assessment! 
    
  • Activates the integration between the thalamus and amygdala. 
    
  • Acts differently on the amygdala in comparison to the frontal cortex and hippocampus: Stress strengthens the integration between the Amygdala and the hippocampus, making the hippocampus fearful. 
    
  • BLA & BNST respond with increased BDNF levels and expanded dendrites persistently increasing anxiety and fear conditioning. 
    
  • Makes it easier to learn a fear association and to consolidate it into long-term memory.  Sustained stress makes it harder to unlearn fear by making the prefrontal cortex inhibit the BLA from learning to break the fear association and weakening the prefrontal cortex's hold over the amygdala.  And glucocorticoids decrease activation of the medial prefrontal cortex during processing of emotional faces.  Accuracy of assessing emotions from faces suffers.  A terrified rat generating lots of glucocorticoids will cause dendrites in the hippocampus to atrophy but when it generates the same amount from excitement of running on a wheel the dendrites expand.  The activation of the amygdala seems to determine how the hippocampus responds. 
    
  • Depletes the nucleus accumbens of dopamine biasing rats toward social subordination and biasing humans toward depression. 
    
  • Disrupts working memory by amplifying norepinephrine signalling in the prefrontal cortex and amygdala to prefrontal cortex signalling until they become destructive.  It also desynchronizes activation in different frontal lobe regions impacting shifting of attention.  
  • Increases the risk of autoimmune disease (Jan 2017) 
  • During depression, stress inhibits dopamine signalling.  
  • Strategies for stress reduction include: Mindfulness. 
    
  , amplified consumption and toxic excess, leading to obesity is a disorder where the brain is induced to require more eating, often because of limits to the number of fat cells available to report satiation (Jul 2016).  It is associated with: metabolic syndrome including inflammation, cancer (Aug 2016), high cholesterol, hypertension, type-2-diabetes, asthma and heart disease.  It is suspected that this is contributing to the increase in maternal deaths in the US (Sep 2016).  Obesity is a complex condition best viewed as representing many different diseases, which is affected by the: Amount of brown adipose tissue (Oct 2016), Asprosin signalling by white adipose tissue (Nov 2016), Genetic alleles including 25 which guarantee an obese outcome, side effects of some pharmaceuticals for: Psychiatric disorders, Diabetes, Seizure, Hypertension, Auto-immunity; Acute diseases: Hypothyroidism, Cushing's syndrome, Hypothalamus disorders; State of the gut microbiome.  Infections, but not antibiotics, appear associated with childhood obesity (Nov 2016). 
  , addiction, driving instead of walking, microbiome, the trillions of bacteria and viruses that live inside higher animals' guts, on their skin etc.  These bacteria and viruses seem to play a role in: immune responses, digesting food, making nutrients, controlling mental health and maintaining a healthy weight.  The signals from the gut microbiota are relayed by major nerve fibers: vagus; to the central nervous system.  The symbiotic relationship must be actively managed.  Human armpits include glands which provide food favoring certain symbionts who build a defensive shield above the skin.  In the human gut: Barriers are setup: Mucus secretions form a physical constraint and provide sites for bacteriophages to anchor and attack pathogenic bacteria; Symbiont tailored nourishment: Plant-heavy food creates opportunities for fibre specialists like Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron; is provided, Selective binding sites are provided, Poisons are deployed against the unwelcome, and Temperature, acidity and oxygenation are managed.    High throughput sequencing allows the characterization of bacterial populations inside guts.  Beginning at birth, as they pass down the birth canal infants are supplied with a microbiome from their mothers.  If they are borne via cesarean they never receive some of the key bacteria: Bifidobaterium infantis which is also dependent on oligosaccharides in breast milk; from their mothers.  A variety of diseases may be caused by changes in the microbiome:
  • Eczema can be related to changes in the skin microbiome. 
    
  • Obesity can be induced by changes to the gut microbiome.  
  • Chronic inflammation
    
  • Allergies
    
  • Type 1 diabetes
    
  collapse;
  
• Is incented to focus on localized competition generating massive & costly duplication of services within physician based health care operations instead of proven public health strategies.  This process drives increasing research & treatment complexity and promotes hope for each new technological breakthrough. 
  
• Is amplified by the legislatively structured separation and indirection of service development is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent.  It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents.  That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment.  Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS.  In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult.  In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete. 
  , provision, reimbursement and payment. 
  
• Is impacted by the different political strategies for managing the increasing cost of health care for the demographic bulge of retirees.  
• Is presented with acute and chronic problems to respond to.  As currently setup the network is tuned to handle acute problems.  The interactions with patients tend to be transactional. 
  
• Includes a legislated health insurance infrastructure which is:
• Costly and inefficient
• Structured around yearly contracts which undermine long-term health goals and strategies.  
• Is supported by increasingly regulated HCIT which offers to improve data sharing and quality but has entrenched commercial EHR refers to electronic health records which are a synonym of EMR.  EHR analysis suggests strengths and weaknesses:
  • The EHR provides an integrated record of the health systems notes on a patient including: Diagnosis and Treatment plans and protocols followed, Prescribed drugs with doses, Adverse drug reactions;
  • The EHR does not necessarily reflect the patient's situation accurately. 
    
  • The EHR often acts as a catch-all.  There is often little time for a doctor, newly attending the patient, to review and validate the historic details. 
    
  • The meaningful use requirements of HITECH and Medicare/Medicaid specify compliance of an EHR system or EHR module for specific environments such as an ambulatory or hospital in-patient setting. 
    
  • As of 2016 interfacing with the EHR is cumbersome and undermines face-to-face time between doctor and patient.  Doctors are allocated 12 minutes to interact with a patient of which less than five minutes was used for recording hand written notes.  With the EHR 12 minutes may be required to update the record!
    
  products deep within the hospital systems is the owner of a set of hospitals and other owned infrastructure and employer of direct staff.  . 
  

Introduction

• Prices vary tenfold!  They depend on who you work for.  The poorest pay the highest prices. 
  
• Medical decisions are taken by for-profit business employees. Medical assessments are made by clerical staff.  Hospital patients are discharged - have costly handoff problems reviewed by project BOOST.  When discharge takes too long it ties up acute bed space which can result in adding up to 30% more (unnecessary) capacity when improved discharge would translate into additional revenue.  Various interventions aim to improve the execution of the process including: CTI, TCN and RED for discharge to outpatient; InterAct for discharge to SNFs and BPIP to HHAs.  Discharge information can include:
  • Patient info
    
  • Behavioral summary
  • Treatment history
  • Medical history
  • Treatment objectives
  • Insurance policy
  • Discharge plans
  early overriding the judgments of doctors.  
• Preventative care is discouraged.  Overtreatment is the application of unnecessary health care.  It is a complex problem:
  • Overtreatment needs to be adaptive.  As people age their medicine levels typically need to be changed.  Often, as in the case of blood pressure, and blood sugar reduction, they should be reduced to avoid inducing falls (Nov 2015).  
  • Patients with chronic diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, often require different treatment settings.  And again these vary with age. 
    
  • Patients who have learned a regime, and been told it was successful, may resist instructions to change it.  Some worry that they will impact their health care provider's treatment performance measures. 
    
  is encouraged.  Huge numbers of people die from medical mistakes. 
  
• More than 48 million Americans don't have health insurance.  18,000 die each year.  Many have to be treated in expensive emergency wards is emergency department.  Pain is the main reason (75%) patients go to an E.D.  It has traditionally been part of an acute care hospital but recently is being deployed standalone as a catchment funnel to the owning hospital.  The EMTALA legislation requires E.D. treatment to stabilize every person seeking treatment by most hospitals.  Unreimbursed care is supported from federal government funds.  E. D. profitability has been helped by hospitals contracting with 3rd party companies who are able to improve margins through surprise billing.  The standalone E.D. competes with the positioning and brand power of lower cost urgent care clinics.  Commercial nature of care requires walk-ins to register to gain access to care.  With the focus on treatment of pain, E.D.s are a major distributor of opioids (5% of opioid prescriptions) and a major starting point of addiction in patients but are cutting back (Jun 2016). 
  .  
• More than 10 million Americans are under insured.  They risk bankruptcy is a legal status for an entity that cannot repay its creditor's loans.  It holds creditor lawsuits in abeyance while the restructuring process proceeds to allow the entity to continue operations.  It also has legal tools for forcing holdout creditors to accept repayments that are lower than the bond sale initially promised. 
  when treated by the health care network. 
  
• Thirty years of government policy has pushed for cost reductions within the health care network.  Each strategy has failed to reduce costs, while creating distortions.  A huge, costly billing and administrative infrastructure has developed.  Doctors are encouraged to overtreat is the application of unnecessary health care.  It is a complex problem:
  • Overtreatment needs to be adaptive.  As people age their medicine levels typically need to be changed.  Often, as in the case of blood pressure, and blood sugar reduction, they should be reduced to avoid inducing falls (Nov 2015).  
  • Patients with chronic diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, often require different treatment settings.  And again these vary with age. 
    
  • Patients who have learned a regime, and been told it was successful, may resist instructions to change it.  Some worry that they will impact their health care provider's treatment performance measures. 
    
  and focus on profitable specialties. 
  This presentation reviews just-in-time manufacturing with analysis based on complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. 
  
  Just-in-time manufacturing methodologies, misapplied to hospitals, starved the network of resources, inducing chaos provides an explanation for the apparently random period between water droplets falling from a tap.  Typically the model of the system is poor and so the data captured about the system looks unpredictable - chaotic.  With a better model the system's operation can be explained with standard physical principles.  Hence chaos as defined here is different from complexity.   within the complex operations. 
  

• The overall US is the United States of America.   economy is a human SuperOrganism complex adaptive system (CAS) which operates and controls trade flows within a rich niche.  Economics models economies.  Robert Gordon has described the evolution of the American economy.  Like other CAS economic flows are maintained far from equilibrium by: demand, financial flows and constraints, supply infrastructure constraints, political and military constraints; ensuring wealth, legislative control, legal contracts and power have significant leverage through evolved amplifiers. 
  induces a large number of costly health problems.  It and its main food sub-network are based on augmentation with fossil fuels.  Leveraging coal and oil has transformed what we eat: 
  
• The fossil fuels
  This page reviews the catalytic impact of infrastructure on the expression of phenotypic effects by an agent.  The infrastructure reduces the cost the agent must pay to perform the selected action.  The catalysis is enhanced by positive returns. 
  
  amplified the
  Through the operation of three different food chains Michael Pollan explores their relative merits.  The application of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory highlights the value of evolutionary testing of the food chain. 
  
  food production network:
  
• Processed food companies: Beverages (Coca-Cola), Fast-food (McDonalds), Sugar, COC lobbied capital enabled global alcohol; ensure supply of easily distributed long lasting addictive commodities. 
  
• Retail; powerful
  Plans are interpreted and implemented by agents.  This page discusses the properties of agents in a complex adaptive system (CAS). 
  It then presents examples of agents in different CAS.  The examples include a computer program where modeling and actions are performed by software agents.  These software agents are aggregates. 
  The participation of agents in flows is introduced and some implications of this are outlined. 
  
  agents supported by WTO is the World Trade Organization. 
  
  This page reviews the strategy of setting up an arms race.  At its core this strategy depends on being able to alter, or take advantage of an alteration in, the genome or equivalent.  The situation is illustrated with examples from biology, high tech and politics. 
  
  trade agreements.  With food-processing adding fat, sugar & salt, food is very stimulating and plentiful.  This has allowed the total human population to rise geometrically until it is running up against the carrying capacity of the planet:
  E. O. Wilson reviews the effect of man on the natural world to date and explains how the two systems can coexist most effectively. 
  
  Land area per human, Atmospheric carbon.  Humans did not evolve to manage food excess - with dopamine is a synaptic signal supporting generalized goal-directed behavior & anticipation of reward.  Its significance is that the receptors that detect the signal are of the slow acting type and are used to alter (modulate) the response of fast acting dopaminergic neural circuits in which the receptors are deployed (LTP).  The signal detects significant changes including predictions of models and actual results which differ unexpectedly.  The dopamine network architecture is designed to signal the possibility of any type of reward: Norm violation punishment, Winning a lottery, & Misfortune of an envied competitor.  Dopamine signalling:
  
  • Rescales continuously to accommodate the range of intensity offered by different stimuli.  So dopamine's responses to any reward habituate.  GABA is released by some tegmental neurons to induce habituation. 
    
  • Reflects the anticipation of reward.  It supports establishment of a relationship between a signal, working for a reward and obtaining the reward, but subsequently dopamine is mainly released encouraging the work, right after the signal supporting anticipation of the reward.  Anticipation requires learning and is reflected in hippocampus activity.  That explains context dependent cravings.  And the learning architecture means reliable cues become rewarding.  The accumbens supports willpower.  And dopamine
    
  • Promotes goal-oriented behavior needed to obtain & likely to achieve the reward - through the dopamine projections to the prefrontal cortex.  That makes dopamine central to:
    
  • Motivation.  This binding fails in depression - due to stress and in anxiety - due to signals from the amygdala.  
  • The prefrontal cortex's mesocortically stimulated support for willpower to act to delay rewards.  To sustain work for delayed rewards additional dopamine is released based on the length of the delay and the rewards uncertainty (modelled in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex - which promotes the long term and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex - which promotes the short term) and the anticipated size of the reward (modelled in the accumbens).  Impulsiveness in ADHD is reflected in abnormal dopamine processing.  Addictive drugs bias the dopamine network towards impulsiveness.  
  • Is lowered by certain gene variants which induce: less dopamine in the synapse, fewer receptors, lower responsiveness of receptors; associated with (as tiny effects in hugely varying social scenarios): sensation seeking, risk taking, attentional problems, extroversion; where:
    
  • The receptor D4's gene shows high variability.  The D47R form is relatively unresponsive to dopamine.  
  • Dopamine is degraded by COMT.  The COMT gene includes a variant which is highly efficient reducing dopamine signalling but with complicating gene/environment interactions.  
  • Dopamine is removed from the synapse by a reuptake transporter DAT. 
    
  habituation ensuring the more we consume the hungrier we get, and we have struggled with the induced health issues. 
  
• Formula companies: Abbott labs, Nestle; global sales supported by US government pressure, as W.H.O. is World Health Organization a United Nations organization. 
  pushes back. 
  
• Agri-business provides the conversion of fuel into fertilizer, 
• Finance: Conglomerates, Private Equity is the pooling of commitments from fund investors, to: buy assets that are not publicly traded: companies, real estate, and debt; improve their acquisition's value and sell them again, returning the sale cash to the fund investors.  Private equity companies gain competitive advantage from being lightly regulated, and wealth from the fees and special tax privileges.  Private equity companies were initially corporate raiders. 
  ; constrains, funds and shapes the global network. 
  
• The increasing ability for producers and channel managers to manipulate the food web has transformed the relationship between humanity and its prey animals and edible plants.  They may still look similar but they are easier to obtain, more plentiful and modified: cleaner, less fresh - meat is transported for longer once killed and thus has many vitamins and volatiles denatured, fruit picked unripe, most everything reconstituted to appear fresh.  These foods are ample but do not return us to the ideal rural situation.  Powerful toxins and endocrine disrupters: pesticides and herbicides are deployed to limit pest infestations.  Milk is a mammalian adaptation.  It provides highly effective nutrition, signalling, protection & controls for newborns, constructed by mothers during 200 million years of evolution.  It includes: Lactose, Fats, Over 200 oligosaccharides - many of them targeted at support of Bifidobacterium infantis, Antibodies, Bacteriophages, & Peptidoglycans; which support the initial adaptations of the mammalian newborn, including its microbiome. 
  is separated, heated, homogenized and reconstituted. 
  
• From 1800 to 1980 the average calories consumed by Americans remained constant but after 1980 calorie consumption grew contributing to obesity is a disorder where the brain is induced to require more eating, often because of limits to the number of fat cells available to report satiation (Jul 2016).  It is associated with: metabolic syndrome including inflammation, cancer (Aug 2016), high cholesterol, hypertension, type-2-diabetes, asthma and heart disease.  It is suspected that this is contributing to the increase in maternal deaths in the US (Sep 2016).  Obesity is a complex condition best viewed as representing many different diseases, which is affected by the: Amount of brown adipose tissue (Oct 2016), Asprosin signalling by white adipose tissue (Nov 2016), Genetic alleles including 25 which guarantee an obese outcome, side effects of some pharmaceuticals for: Psychiatric disorders, Diabetes, Seizure, Hypertension, Auto-immunity; Acute diseases: Hypothyroidism, Cushing's syndrome, Hypothalamus disorders; State of the gut microbiome.  Infections, but not antibiotics, appear associated with childhood obesity (Nov 2016). 
  and type 2 diabetes is the leading cause of blindness, limb amputations and kidney failure.  Insulin and glucose levels are regulated by the pancreas, liver, muscle, brain and fat.  Diabetes occurs when the insulin level is insufficient to regulate the glucose in the system.  Increased fat levels in obesity demand more insulin overloading the pancreas.  Persistent high glucose levels are also toxic to the pancreas beta cells.  High glucocorticoid levels have been associated with type 2 diabetes.  There are genetic risk factors since siblings of someone with the disease have three times the baseline risk (about 50% of the risk of getting type 2 diabetes is genetic).  The inheritance is polygenic.  More than 20 genes have been identified as risk factors, but that is too few to account for the 50% weighting so many more will be identified.  Of those identified so far many are associated with the beta cells.  The one with the strongest relative risk is TCF7L2.  The disease can be effectively controlled through a diligent application of treatments and regular checkups.  Doctors are monitored for how under control their patients' diabetes is (Sep 2015).  Treatments include:
  • Metformin - does not change the course of pre-diabetes - if you stop taking it, it is as if it hasn't been taken. 
    
  • Diet
  • Exercise
  .  
• The F.D.A. Food and Drug Administration.  , D.O.A. - U.S. Department of Agriculture. 
  and C.D.C. is the HHS's center for disease control and prevention based in Atlanta Georgia.  
  provide regulatory checks on the food sub-network. 
  
• Cars and the supporting infrastructure increased personal freedom but massively reduced the amount the US population is walking while increasing deadly accidents from driving errors and distractions: cell phone and texting. 
  
• Large scale passenger aircraft allowed for global passenger
  Flows of different kinds are essential to the operation of complex adaptive systems (CAS). 
  Example flows are outlined.  Constraints on flows support the emergence of the systems.  Examples of constraints are discussed. 
  
  flows.  This has removed barriers to infectious disease transmission enabling networked epidemics is the rapid spread of infectious disease: AIDS (Oct 2016), Cholera (2010), Clostridium difficile (May 2015), Ebola, Influenza, Polio, SARS, Tuberculosis, Typhoid (Apr 2018), Malaria, Yellow fever, Zika; to large numbers of people in a population within a short period of time -- two weeks or less.  Epidemics are studied and monitored by: NIAID, CDC, WHO; but are managed by states in the US.  Infection control escalation is supported by biocontainment units: Emory, Nebraska.  Once memes are included in the set of infectious schematic materials, human addictions can present as epidemics concludes Dr. Nora Volkow of the NIDA.  CEPI aims to ensure public health networks are effectively prepared for epidemics.  PHCPI aims to strengthen PCPs globally to improve responsiveness to epidemics.  GAVI helps catalyze the development and deployment of vaccines.  Sporadic investment in public health enables development of conditions for vector development: Mosquitos.  The increasing demands of the global population are altering the planet: Climate change is shifting mosquito bases, Forests are being invaded bringing wildlife and their diseases in contact with human networks.  Globalized travel acts as an infection amplifier: Ebola to Texas.  Health clinics have also acted as amplifiers: AIDS in Haiti, C. diff & MRSA infections enabled & amplified by hospitals.  Haiti earthquake support from the UN similarly introduced Cholera. 
  and pandemics stressing the public health network: CDC is the HHS's center for disease control and prevention based in Atlanta Georgia.  
  , WHO is World Health Organization a United Nations organization. 
  ; and health care networks: Texas Health Presbyterian. 
  
• The gun manufacturers and their political lobby, the NRA is national rifle association and during the New Deal was the National Recovery Administration which required a minimum wage and eight hour work day.  The National Recovery Administration was found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1935.  , have a single focus lobby of government which ensures the US population has relatively high levels of: Access to guns, Deadly accidents from their use.  
• Smoking, and recently vaping, are supported by nicotine addiction, and a powerful lobby.  Smoking significantly reduces life expectancy is a measure of the average life time of a new born baby.  Without public health assistance many children die in the first five years of life significantly lowering the life expectancy of the whole group.  There are representational and data capture problems with the model:
  
  • Not knowing the risk of dying in the newborn's future, demographers use the risks present at that time to predict impacts in the future of the person.  No adjustment can be made for increased wellbeing. 
    
  • Saving the lives of children has a far larger effect on increasing life expectancy than extending the lives of the elderly
    
  • Impacts that occur in a particular year, such as a epidemic or pandemic, are treated as permanent effects for that years life expectancy even though they may be handled by public health strategies and hence be transients.  For life expectancy calculations in subsequent years the impact is ignored.  
  • Programs that reduced the impacts of infectious diseases, such as antibiotics and vaccine deployment, have reduced the variability of life expectancy following their introduction.  
  • Vital registration systems gather accurate data for life expectancy.  But most countries do not have the infrastructure and instead estimates are generated from demographic and health surveys. 
    
  , inducing a range of diseases: cardiovascular refers to:
  
  • Conditions where narrowed and blocked blood vessels result in angina, hypertension, CHD and heart attacks and hemorrhagic/ischemic strokes.  Mutations of the gene PCSK9 have been implicated in cardiovascular disease.  Rare families with dominant inheritence of the mutations have an overactive protein, very high levels of blood cholesterol and cardiac disease. Other rare PCSK9 mutations result in an 88% reduced risk from heart disease.  Inflammation is associated with cardiovascular disease (Aug 2017). 
    
  , COPD is chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.  It is one of the most common lung diseases.  Chronic bronchitis and emphysema are the major forms.  , cancers is the out-of-control growth of cells, which have stopped obeying their cooperative schematic planning and signalling infrastructure.  It results from compounded: oncogene, tumor suppressor, DNA caretaker; mutations in the DNA.  In 2010 one third of Americans are likely to die of cancer.  Cell division rates did not predict likelihood of cancer.  Viral infections are associated.  Radiation and carcinogen exposure are associated.  Lifestyle impacts the likelihood of cancer occurring: Drinking alcohol to excess, lack of exercise, Obesity, Smoking, More sun than your evolved melanin protection level; all significantly increase the risk of cancer occurring (Jul 2016).  . 
  
• The shift from the majority of people working in agriculture, bathed in sun light all day, every day, to working in offices has reduced exercise and light levels.  Both of these reductions reduce tryptophan (serotonin is a neurotransmitter.  it is:
  • Inversely associated with: human impulsive, cricket, mollusk, crustacean; aggression.  Low levels of serotonin are associated with impulsive aggression ranging from psychological measures of hostility to overt violence and cognitive impulsivity and impulsive suicide. 
    
  • Nearly all synthesized in the Raphe nucleus.  Tryptophan hydroxylase makes serotonin from the amino-acid tryptophan.  Monoamine oxidase degrades serotonin.  The serotonin receptor binds serotonin to initiate cross membrane signalling.  The serotonin transporter actively removes serotonin from synapses.  Serotonin levels can be increased with: exercise, high light levels, consumption of chickpeas and traditional lime boiled corn tortillas.  Reuptake is inhibited by SSRIs.  Variants of the genes coding for these various enzymes alter the strength of their effects. 
    
  • Increasing serotonin signalling does not lessen impulsiveness in normal subjects but did in those prone to impulsivity.  However, such experiments are fraught with complexity:
  • Transient changes induced by drugs may adjust the immediate levels of serotonin but may not demonstrate structural effects. 
    
  • Gene variants likely produce structural changes in the developing brain.  
  • Effects monitored in experiments are often tiny.  
  • Behavioral changes: Violence, Arson, Exhibitionism; seen in different test subjects may be difficult to compare.  
  • Monoamine oxidase has high gene/environment interactions undermining heritability estimates.  Its gene promotor is regulated by stress and glucocorticoids.  So non genetic factors such as childhood adversity and adult provocation appear to be significant.  
  ) levels increasing susceptibility to depression is a debilitating state which is facilitated by genetic predisposition - for example genes coding for relatively low serotonin levels; and an accumulation of traumatic events.  There is evidence of shifts in the sleep/wake cycle in affected individuals (Dec 2015).  The affected person will experience a pathological sense of loss of control, prolonged sadness, irritability, sleep disturbances, loss of appetite, and inability to experience pleasure.  Michael Pollan concludes depression is fear of the past.  It affects 12% of men and 20% of women.  It appears to be associated with androgen deprivation therapy treatment for prostate cancer (Apr 2016).  Chronic stress depletes the nucleus accumbens of dopamine, biasing humans towards depression.  Depression easily leads to following unhealthy pathways: drinking, overeating; which increase the risk of heart disease.   It has been associated with an aging related B12 deficiency (Sep 2016).  During depression, stress mediates inhibition of dopamine signalling.  There is an association between depression and particular brain regions: Hippocampal dendrite and spine number reductions, Dorsal raphe nucleus linked to loneliness, Abnormalities of the ACC.  Childhood adversity can increase depression risk by linking recollections of uncontrollable situations to overgeneralizations that life will always be terrible and uncontrollable.  Treatments include: CBT, UMHS depression management.  As of 2010 drug treatments take weeks to facilitate a response & many patients do not respond to the first drug applied, often prolonging the agony.   Genomic predictions of which treatment will be effective have not been possible because: Not all clinical depressions are the same, a standard definition of drug response is difficult;. 
  
• Electric light & central heating safely extend the waking hours.  But they encourage habits that result in lack of sleep.  Sleep facilitates salient memory formation and removal of non-salient memories.  The five different stages of the nightly sleep cycles support different aspects of memory formation.  The sleep stages follow Pre-sleep and include: Stage one characterized by light sleep and lasting 10 minutes, Stage two where theta waves and sleep spindles occur, Stage three and Stage four together represent deep slow-wave sleep (SWS) with delta waves, Stage five is REM sleep; sleep cycles last between 90-110 minutes each and as the night progresses SWS times reduce and REM times increase.   Sleep includes the operation of synapse synthesis and maintenance through DNA based activity including membrane trafficking, synaptic vesicle recycling, myelin structural protein formation and cholesterol and protein synthesis.  Sleep also controls inflammation (Jan 2019)  Sleep deprivation undermines the thalamus & nucleus accumbens management of pain. 
  is a complex operation which takes time to complete successfully.  The
  Carlo Rovelli resolves the paradox of time. 
  Rovelli initially explains that low level physics does not include time:
  

  • A present that is common throughout the universe does not exist
    
  • Events are only partially ordered.  The present is localized
  • The difference between past and future is not foundational.  It occurs because of state that through our blurring appears particular to us
  • Time passes at different speeds dependent on where we are and how fast we travel
    
  • Time's rhythms are due to the gravitational field
    
  • Our quantized physics shows neither space nor time, just processes transforming physical variables. 
    
  • Fundamentally there is no time.  The basic equations evolve together with events, not things 

  Then he explains how in a physical world without time its perception can emerge:
  

  • Our familiar time emerges
    
  • Our interaction with the world is partial, blurred, quantum indeterminate
    
  • The ignorance determines the existence of thermal time and entropy that quantifies our uncertainty
  • Directionality of time is real but perspectival.  The entropy of the world in relation to us increases with our thermal time.  The growth of entropy distinguishes past from future: resulting in traces and memories
    
  • Each human is a unified being because: we reflect the world, we formed an image of a unified entity by interacting with our kind, and because of the perspective of memory
    
  • The variable time: is one of the variables of the gravitational field.  With our scale we don't register quantum fluctuations, making space-time appear determined.  At our speed we don't perceive differences in time of different clocks, so we experience a single time: universal, uniform, ordered; which is helpful to our decisions

  
  
  time required will depend on the level and significance of the proximate stimulus, the current state and the developmental phase of the person. 
  
• Smart-phone 'app'
  This page discusses the effect of the network on the agents participating in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  Small world and scale free networks are considered. 
  
  network effects have been hugely successful in capturing users.  This has been augmented with
  This page reviews the strategy of setting up an arms race.  At its core this strategy depends on being able to alter, or take advantage of an alteration in, the genome or equivalent.  The situation is illustrated with examples from biology, high tech and politics. 
  
  evolved amplifiers based on dopamine is a synaptic signal supporting generalized goal-directed behavior & anticipation of reward.  Its significance is that the receptors that detect the signal are of the slow acting type and are used to alter (modulate) the response of fast acting dopaminergic neural circuits in which the receptors are deployed (LTP).  The signal detects significant changes including predictions of models and actual results which differ unexpectedly.  The dopamine network architecture is designed to signal the possibility of any type of reward: Norm violation punishment, Winning a lottery, & Misfortune of an envied competitor.  Dopamine signalling:
  
  • Rescales continuously to accommodate the range of intensity offered by different stimuli.  So dopamine's responses to any reward habituate.  GABA is released by some tegmental neurons to induce habituation. 
    
  • Reflects the anticipation of reward.  It supports establishment of a relationship between a signal, working for a reward and obtaining the reward, but subsequently dopamine is mainly released encouraging the work, right after the signal supporting anticipation of the reward.  Anticipation requires learning and is reflected in hippocampus activity.  That explains context dependent cravings.  And the learning architecture means reliable cues become rewarding.  The accumbens supports willpower.  And dopamine
    
  • Promotes goal-oriented behavior needed to obtain & likely to achieve the reward - through the dopamine projections to the prefrontal cortex.  That makes dopamine central to:
    
  • Motivation.  This binding fails in depression - due to stress and in anxiety - due to signals from the amygdala.  
  • The prefrontal cortex's mesocortically stimulated support for willpower to act to delay rewards.  To sustain work for delayed rewards additional dopamine is released based on the length of the delay and the rewards uncertainty (modelled in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex - which promotes the long term and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex - which promotes the short term) and the anticipated size of the reward (modelled in the accumbens).  Impulsiveness in ADHD is reflected in abnormal dopamine processing.  Addictive drugs bias the dopamine network towards impulsiveness.  
  • Is lowered by certain gene variants which induce: less dopamine in the synapse, fewer receptors, lower responsiveness of receptors; associated with (as tiny effects in hugely varying social scenarios): sensation seeking, risk taking, attentional problems, extroversion; where:
    
  • The receptor D4's gene shows high variability.  The D47R form is relatively unresponsive to dopamine.  
  • Dopamine is degraded by COMT.  The COMT gene includes a variant which is highly efficient reducing dopamine signalling but with complicating gene/environment interactions.  
  • Dopamine is removed from the synapse by a reuptake transporter DAT. 
    
  habituation ensuring the more we use the apps the more we want to check for updates.  For children and adolescents in humans supports the transition from a juvenile configuration, dependent on parents and structured to learn & logistically transform, to adult optimized to the proximate environment.  And it is staged encouraging the adolescents to escape the hierarchy they grew up in and enter other groups where they may bring in: fresh ideas, risk taking; and alter the existing hierarchy: Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak, Bill Gates & Paul Allen.  It marks the beginning of Piaget's formal operational stage of cognitive development.  The limbic, autonomic and hormone networks are already deployed and functioning effectively.  The frontal cortex has to be pruned: winning neurons move to their final highly connected positions, and are myelinated over time.  The rest dissolve.  So the frontal lobe does not obtain its adult configuration and networked integration until the mid-twenties when prefrontal cortex control becomes optimal.  The evolutionarily oldest areas of the frontal cortex mature first.  The PFC must be iteratively customized by experience to do the right thing as an adult.  Adolescents:
  • Don't detect irony effectively.  They depend on the DMPFC to do this, unlike adults who leverage the fusiform face area.  
  • Regulate emotions with the ventral striatum while the prefrontal cortex is still being setup.  Dopamine projection density and signalling increase from the ventral tegmentum catalyzing increased interest in dopamine based rewards.  Novelty seeking allows for creative exploration which was necessary to move beyond the familial pack.  Criticisms do not get incorporated into learning models by adolescents leaving their risk assessments very poor.  The target of the dopamine networks, the adolescent accumbens, responds to rewards like a gyrating top - hugely to large rewards, and negatively to small rewards.  Eventually as the frontal regions increase in contribution there are steady improvements in: working memory, flexible rule use, executive organization and task shifting.  And adolescents start to see other people's perspective. 
    
  • Drive the cellular transformations with post-pubescent high levels of testosterone in males, and high but fluctuating estrogen & progesterone levels in females.  Blood flow to the frontal cortex is also diverted on occasion to the groin.  
  • Peer pressure is exceptionally influential in adolescents.  Admired peer comments reduce vmPFC activity and enhance ventral striatal activity.  Adults modulate the mental impact of socially mean treatment: the initial activation of the PAG, anterior cingulate, amygdala, insula cortex; which generate feelings of pain, anger, and disgust, with the VLPFC but that does not occur in adolescents.  
  • Feel empathy intensely, supported by their rampant emotions, interest in novelty, ego.  But feeling the pain of others can induce self-oriented avoidance of the situations. 
    
  this induced addiction is associated with reduced IQ and other developmental issues. 
  
• The culture is how we do and think about things, transmitted by non-genetic means as defined by Frans de Waal.  CAS theory views cultures as operating via memetic schemata evolved by memetic operators to support a cultural superorganism.  Evolutionary psychology asserts that human culture reflects adaptations generated while hunting and gathering.  Dehaene views culture as essentially human, shaped by exaptations and reading, transmitted with support of the neuronal workspace and stabilized by neuronal recycling.  Sapolsky argues that parents must show children how to transform their genetically derived capabilities into a culturally effective toolset.  He is interested in the broad differences across cultures of: Life expectancy, GDP, Death in childbirth, Violence, Chronic bullying, Gender equality, Happiness, Response to cheating, Individualist or collectivist, Enforcing honor, Approach to hierarchy; illustrating how different a person's life will be depending on the culture where they are raised.  Culture:
  • Is deployed during pregnancy & childhood, with parental mediation.  Nutrients, immune messages and hormones all affect the prenatal brain.  Hormones: Testosterone with anti-Mullerian hormone masculinizes the brain by entering target cells and after conversion to estrogen binding to intracellular estrogen receptors; have organizational effects producing lifelong changes.  Parenting style typically produces adults who adopt the same approach.  And mothering style can alter gene regulation in the fetus in ways that transfer epigenetically to future generations!  PMS symptoms vary by culture. 
    
  • Is also significantly transmitted to children by their peers during play.  So parents try to control their children's peer group.  
  • Is transmitted to children by their neighborhoods, tribes, nations etc. 
    
  • Influences the parenting style that is considered appropriate. 
    
  • Can transform dominance into honor.  There are ecological correlates of adopting honor cultures.  Parents in honor cultures are typically authoritarian. 
    
  • Is strongly adapted across a meta-ethnic frontier according to Turchin.  
  • Across Europe was shaped by the Carolingian empire. 
    
  • Can provide varying levels of support for innovation.  
  • Produces consciousness according to Dennet. 
    
  of the US has become oriented towards the support of powerful enterprises.  Children, adolescents and adults are told that life long learning allows them to reinvent themselves.  The impact of this shift is:
• To allow businesses to abandon stable hierarchy. 
  
• To leave the adult employees with the long term stress is a multi-faceted condition reflecting high cortisol levels.  Dr. Robert Sapolsky's studies of baboons indicate that stress helps build readiness for fight or flight.  As these actions occur the levels of cortisol return to the baseline rate.  A stressor is anything that disrupts the regular homeostatic balance.  The stress response is the array of neural and endocrine changes that occur to respond effectively to the crisis and reestablish homeostasis. 
  
  • The short term response to the stressor
    
  • activates the amygdala which: Stimulates the brain stem resulting in inhibition of the parasympathetic nervous system and activation of the sympathetic nervous system with the hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine deployed around the body, Activates the PVN which generates a cascade resulting in glucocorticoid secretion to: get energy to the muscles with increased blood pressure for a powerful response.  The brain's acuity and cognition are stimulated.  The immune system is stimulated with beta-endorphin and repair activities curtail.  But when the stressor is
    
  • long term: loneliness, debt; and no action is necessary, or possible, long term damage ensues.  Damage from such stress may only occur in specific situations: Nuclear families coping with parents moving in.  Sustained stress provides an evolved amplifier of a position of dominance and status.  It is a strategy in female aggression used to limit reproductive competition.  Sustained stress:
    
  • Stops the frontal cortex from ensuring we do the harder thing, instead substituting amplification of the individual's propensity for risk-taking and impairing risk assessment! 
    
  • Activates the integration between the thalamus and amygdala. 
    
  • Acts differently on the amygdala in comparison to the frontal cortex and hippocampus: Stress strengthens the integration between the Amygdala and the hippocampus, making the hippocampus fearful. 
    
  • BLA & BNST respond with increased BDNF levels and expanded dendrites persistently increasing anxiety and fear conditioning. 
    
  • Makes it easier to learn a fear association and to consolidate it into long-term memory.  Sustained stress makes it harder to unlearn fear by making the prefrontal cortex inhibit the BLA from learning to break the fear association and weakening the prefrontal cortex's hold over the amygdala.  And glucocorticoids decrease activation of the medial prefrontal cortex during processing of emotional faces.  Accuracy of assessing emotions from faces suffers.  A terrified rat generating lots of glucocorticoids will cause dendrites in the hippocampus to atrophy but when it generates the same amount from excitement of running on a wheel the dendrites expand.  The activation of the amygdala seems to determine how the hippocampus responds. 
    
  • Depletes the nucleus accumbens of dopamine biasing rats toward social subordination and biasing humans toward depression. 
    
  • Disrupts working memory by amplifying norepinephrine signalling in the prefrontal cortex and amygdala to prefrontal cortex signalling until they become destructive.  It also desynchronizes activation in different frontal lobe regions impacting shifting of attention.  
  • Increases the risk of autoimmune disease (Jan 2017) 
  • During depression, stress inhibits dopamine signalling.  
  • Strategies for stress reduction include: Mindfulness. 
    
  of unstable hierarchy.  
  
• Power of the elites is increasing and trapping capital is the sum total nonhuman assets that can be owned and exchanged on some market according to Piketty.  Capital includes: real property, financial capital and professional capital.  It is not immutable instead depending on the state of the society within which it exists.  It can be owned by governments (public capital) and private individuals (private capital).  .  Since the 1980s tax adjustments have driven income and capital to the elites (Dec 2017).  This encourages focusing capital on whims and allows many poor areas to collapse.  
• Various states and Puerto Rico have built up huge public debt burdens and are verging on collapse (Dec 2017).  These problems will make funding Social Security is the social securities act of 1935 was part of the second New Deal.  It attempted to limit risks of old age, poverty and unemployment.  It is funded through payroll taxes via FICA and SECA into the social security trust funds.  Title IV of the original SSA created what became the AFDC.  The Social Security Administration controls the OASI and DI trust funds.  The funds are administered by the trustees.  The SSA was amended in 1965 to include:
  • Title V is Maternal and child health services. 
    
  • Title XVIII is Medicare.  
  , Medicare is a social insurance program that guarantees access to health insurance for Americans aged 65 and over, and younger people with disabilities and end stage renal disease or ALS.  Medicare is currently missing a cap on out-of-pocket costs and direct prescription drug coverage.  It includes:
  
  • Benefits
  • Part A: Hospital inpatient insurance.  As of Dec 2013 Medicare pays for home care in only limited circumstances, such as when a person needs temporary nursing care after a hospitalization.  Part A covers 20 days of inpatient rehabilitation at a SNF after discharge from inpatient care at a hospital. 
    
  • Part B: Medical insurance for non-hospital services including: doctor visits, tests, injectable drugs, ambulances, physical therapy;
    
  • Part C: Medicare Advantage 
  • Part D: indirect prescription drug coverage The MMA prohibits Medicare from directly negotiating drug prices. 
    
  • Eligibility
    
  • All persons 65 years of age or older who are legal residents for at least 5 years.  If they or a spouse have paid Medicare taxes for 10 years the Medicare part A payments are waived.  Medicare is legislated to become the primary health plan. 
    
  • Persons under 65 with disabilities who receive SSDI. 
    
  • Persons with specific medical conditions:
  • Have end stage renal disease or need a kidney transplant. 
    
  • They have ALS. 
    
  • Some beneficiaries are dual eligible. 
    
  • Part A requires the person has been admitted as an inpatient at a hospital.  This is constrained by a rule that they stay for three days after admission.  
    
  • Sign-up
  • Part A has automatic sign-up if the person is drawing social security.  Otherwise the person must sign-up for Part A and Part B. 
    
  • Should sign-up for Part B during the Initial Enrollment Period, of seven months centered around 65th birthday, online or at a social security office.  But if still covered by spouse's insurance or not yet retired then may only join during the 3 month general enrollment period (January to March) each year, with coverage initiated the following July.  Incremental yearly 10% penalties apply for not signing up at 65.  These penalties apply to all subsequent premiums. 
    
  • Premiums
  • Part A premium
  • Part B insurance premium
    
  • Part C & D premiums are set by the commercial insurer.  
  and Medicaid is the state-federal program for the poor.  Originally part of Lyndon Johnson's 1965 Bill, eligibility and services vary by state.  Medicaid currently pays less for care than Medicare, resulting in many care providers refusing to participate in the program.  Less than 10 percent of Medicaid recipients, those in long-term care including nursing homes where 64% are dependent on Medicaid, use one-third of all Medicaid spending which is a problem.  The ACA's Medicaid expansion program, made state optional by the SCOTUS decision, was initially taken up by fifty percent of states.  As of 2016 it covers 70 million Americans at a federal cost of $350 billion a year.  In 2017 it pays for 40% of new US births. 
  more complex.  
• The middle class are continuously stressed is a multi-faceted condition reflecting high cortisol levels.  Dr. Robert Sapolsky's studies of baboons indicate that stress helps build readiness for fight or flight.  As these actions occur the levels of cortisol return to the baseline rate.  A stressor is anything that disrupts the regular homeostatic balance.  The stress response is the array of neural and endocrine changes that occur to respond effectively to the crisis and reestablish homeostasis. 
  
  • The short term response to the stressor
    
  • activates the amygdala which: Stimulates the brain stem resulting in inhibition of the parasympathetic nervous system and activation of the sympathetic nervous system with the hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine deployed around the body, Activates the PVN which generates a cascade resulting in glucocorticoid secretion to: get energy to the muscles with increased blood pressure for a powerful response.  The brain's acuity and cognition are stimulated.  The immune system is stimulated with beta-endorphin and repair activities curtail.  But when the stressor is
    
  • long term: loneliness, debt; and no action is necessary, or possible, long term damage ensues.  Damage from such stress may only occur in specific situations: Nuclear families coping with parents moving in.  Sustained stress provides an evolved amplifier of a position of dominance and status.  It is a strategy in female aggression used to limit reproductive competition.  Sustained stress:
    
  • Stops the frontal cortex from ensuring we do the harder thing, instead substituting amplification of the individual's propensity for risk-taking and impairing risk assessment! 
    
  • Activates the integration between the thalamus and amygdala. 
    
  • Acts differently on the amygdala in comparison to the frontal cortex and hippocampus: Stress strengthens the integration between the Amygdala and the hippocampus, making the hippocampus fearful. 
    
  • BLA & BNST respond with increased BDNF levels and expanded dendrites persistently increasing anxiety and fear conditioning. 
    
  • Makes it easier to learn a fear association and to consolidate it into long-term memory.  Sustained stress makes it harder to unlearn fear by making the prefrontal cortex inhibit the BLA from learning to break the fear association and weakening the prefrontal cortex's hold over the amygdala.  And glucocorticoids decrease activation of the medial prefrontal cortex during processing of emotional faces.  Accuracy of assessing emotions from faces suffers.  A terrified rat generating lots of glucocorticoids will cause dendrites in the hippocampus to atrophy but when it generates the same amount from excitement of running on a wheel the dendrites expand.  The activation of the amygdala seems to determine how the hippocampus responds. 
    
  • Depletes the nucleus accumbens of dopamine biasing rats toward social subordination and biasing humans toward depression. 
    
  • Disrupts working memory by amplifying norepinephrine signalling in the prefrontal cortex and amygdala to prefrontal cortex signalling until they become destructive.  It also desynchronizes activation in different frontal lobe regions impacting shifting of attention.  
  • Increases the risk of autoimmune disease (Jan 2017) 
  • During depression, stress inhibits dopamine signalling.  
  • Strategies for stress reduction include: Mindfulness. 
    
  worrying about their financial situation.  The fight and flight responses are switched on and left running resulting in stress induced medical problems. 
  
• The poor struggle with collapse, finding no way out and increasingly being at risk of lethal violence.  Evolved responses focus the desperate on shifting resources to the next generation using suicide as a strategy.  
• Positive return economics, W. Brian Arthur's conception of how high tech products have positive economic feedback as they deploy.  Classical products such as foods have negative returns to scale since they take increasing amounts of land, and distribution infrastructure to support getting them to market.  High tech products typically become easier to produce or gain from network effects of being connected together overcoming the negative effects of scale. 
  has driven resources and monopoly is a power relation within:
  
  • A state in which a group has enough power to enforce its will on other citizens.  If this is a central authority with a cohesive military, it can overpower other warlords and stabilize the society. 
    
  • An economy in which one business has enough share in a market segment to control margins to its advantage.  An economic monopoly can be broadly beneficial: AT&T monopoly, US patent monopoly rights;
    
  power to the leaders aims to develop plans and strategies which ensure effective coordination to improve the common good of the in-group.  John Adair developed a leadership methodology based on the three-circles model. 
  of networked high technology companies.  These companies are pushing to enter the medical and
  Salman Khan argues that the evolved global education system is inefficient and organized around constraining and corralling students into accepting dubious ratings that lead to mundane roles.  He highlights a radical and already proven alternative which offers effective self-paced deep learning processes supported by technology and freed up attention of teams of teachers.  Building on his personal experience of helping overcome the unjustified failing grade of a relative Khan:
  

  • Iteratively learns how to teach: Starting with Nadia, Leveraging short videos focused on content, Converging on mastery, With the help of neuroscience, and filling in dependent gaps; resulting in a different approach to the mainstream method. 
    
  • Assesses the broken US education system: Set in its ways, Designed for the 1800s, Inducing holes that are hidden by tests, Tests which ignore creativity.  The resulting teaching process is so inefficient it needs to be supplemented with homework.  Instead teachers were encouraging their pupils to use his tools at home so they could mentor them while they attended school, an inversion that significantly improves the economics. 
    
  • Enters the real world: Builds a scalable service, Working with a real classroom, Trying stealth learning, At Khan Academy full time,  In the curriculum at Los Altos, Supporting life-long learning. 
    
  • Develops The One World Schoolhouse: Back to the future with a one room school, a robust teaching team, and creativity enabled; so with some catalysis even the poorest can become educated and earn credentials for current jobs. 
    
  • Wishes he could also correct: Summer holidays, Transcript based assessments, College education;
  • Concludes it is now possible to provide the infrastructure for creativity to emerge and to support risk taking. 
    

  
  Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames them from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  Disruption is a powerful force for change but if its force is used to support the current teachers to adopt new processes can it overcome the extended phenotypic alignment and evolutionary amplifiers sustaining the current educational network? 
  
  
  educational networks:
• Incentives to teachers are increasing the complexity of the educational network (Sep 2017).  
• Alphabet's DeepMind is entering the pharmaceutical research space (Feb 2019)
  
• Globalization has increased the power of
  Charles Ferguson argues that the US power structure has become highly corrupt. 
  
  Ferguson identifies key events which contributed to the transformation:
  

  • Junk bonds, 
  • Derivative deregulation, 
  • CMOs, ABS and analyst fraud,
    
  • Financial network deregulation,
    
  • Financial network consolidation, 
  • Short term incentives
    

  Subsequently the George W. Bush administration used the situation to build a global bubble, which Wall Street leveraged.  The bursting of the bubble: managed by the Bush Administration and Bernanke Federal Reserve; was advantageous to some. 
  
  Ferguson concludes that the restructured and deregulated financial services industry is damaging to the American economy.  And it is supported by powerful, incentive aligned academics.   He sees the result being a rigged system. 
  
  Ferguson offers his proposals for change and offers hope that a charismatic young FDR will appear. 
  
  Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  Once the constraints are removed from CAS amplifiers, it becomes advantageous to leverage the increased flows.  And it is often relatively damaging not to participate.  Corruption and parasitism can become entrenched. 
  
  
  financed: 3G Capital with Berkshire Hathaway; global food and drink production: Kraft Heinz; and distribution enterprises & the political significance of local jobs: Health care, Teaching;
• The green revolution refers to a set of social technologies: new methods of cultivation; initially used in Mexico during the 1950s to 1970s and then deployed globally, during the 1970s, that increased agricultural production worldwide, and acted as a political constraint on famine and Communism.  It was sponsored by Mexico, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, with leadership from Norman Borlaug and it built on the work of geneticist, Nazareno Strampelli.  The improved production leveraged the development of:
  • High yielding varieties of wheat and rice based on:
  • High rates of nitrogen metabolism (cross breading, genetic engineering) allowing high yield when combined with
    
  • Strong short stems to resist bending and
    
  • Supplied with
    
  • Chemical fertilizers, and agro-chemicals
  • Irrigation
    
  • Disease resistance based on cell level breeding and genetic engineering
  , EISA is Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 was a Democratic Party effort to make cars and trucks more CO2 efficient, while President Bush was keen to move the US towards greater energy independence and security, based on a requirement to develop and use more biofuels shifting subsidies from petroleum.  President George W. Bush signed the act into law.  It has catalyzed a global environmental disaster (Nov 2018). 
  (Nov 2018), globalization and increased
  E. O. Wilson reviews the effect of man on the natural world to date and explains how the two systems can coexist most effectively. 
  
  affluence of Asia has added to the methane and carbon dioxide generation of the USA is the United States of America.   and EU is European Union, the 1992 Maastricht Council of Ministers meeting agreed evolution of the ECSC & CAP cartels to include:
  • A single market across the members' countries supporting the transformation of the ECSC.  It maintained the CAP transfers assisting French farmers. 
    
  • A fixed currency 'snake' that allowed the ECSC to operate, binding the deutschmark to the other currencies of participating members: a mini Bretton Woods exchange rate mechanism; that became a single currency, the euro, managed by an independent ECB (based on the independent German Bundesbank). 
    
  .  The resulting climate change has induced expanded risk, is an assessment of the likelihood of an independent problem occurring.  It can be assigned an accurate probability since it is independent of other variables in the system.  As such it is different from uncertainty. 
  of hurricanes, droughts and wild fires.  All have significant health impacts: smoke (Nov 2018);
  
• E-commerce is disrupting local commerce and encouraging consumers to shop while sitting. 
  
• Contragrade teleodynamic
  Flows of different kinds are essential to the operation of complex adaptive systems (CAS). 
  Example flows are outlined.  Constraints on flows support the emergence of the systems.  Examples of constraints are discussed. 
  
  flows of political agents' conflicting democratic ideas 
• Being the only super power allows the elites to focus on overpowering one another, and limits their dependence on the rapidly aging majority. 
  
• Wealthy is schematically useful information and its equivalent, schematically useful energy, to paraphrase Beinhocker.  It is useful because an agent has schematic strategies that can utilize the information or energy to extend or leverage control of the cognitive niche.    'New Democrats' accept the benefits and costs of globalization.  Disintermediation is the shift of operations from one network provider to another lower cost connected network provider.  The first network provider leverages the cost benefits of the shift to increase its profitability but becomes disrupted.  The lower cost network provider gains revenue flows, expertise and increases its active agents.  Over time this disruptive shift will leave the higher cost network as a highly profitable shell, but the agents that performed the operations that migrated to the low cost network will be ejected from the network.  For a company that may imply the costs of layoffs.  For a state the ejected workers imply increased cost impacts and reduced revenue potential which the state are trading off for improved operating efficiency. 
  of the poor is the unfortunate cost of leveraging a global workforce.  Health care investments offer a way to improve the health of the gross population as long as cost inflation can be contained.  But the local jobs associated with health care and education and the voter hostility to cost management signals, is an emergent capability which is used by cooperating agents to support coordination & rival agents to support control and dominance.  In eukaryotic cells signalling is used extensively.  A signal interacts with the exposed region of a receptor molecule inducing it to change shape to an activated form.  Chains of enzymes interact with the activated receptor relaying, amplifying and responding to the signal to change the state of the cell.  Many of the signalling pathways pass through the nuclear membrane and interact with the DNA to change its state.  Enzymes sensitive to the changes induced in the DNA then start to operate generating actions including sending further signals.  Cell signalling is reviewed by Helmreich.  Signalling is a fundamental aspect of CAS theory and is discussed from the abstract CAS perspective in signals and sensors.  In AWF the eukaryotic signalling architecture has been abstracted in a codelet based implementation.  To be credible signals must be hard to fake.  To be effective they must be easily detected by the target recipient.  To be efficient they are low cost to produce and destroy. 
  : premiums, copayments is a fixed payment for a covered service after any deductible has been met.  It is a key strategy of the ACA to make subscribers aware of the costs of treatment and to put pressure on high cost health services.  As such suppliers and providers are keen to undermine the copayment: value based health insurance, Paying the copayment (Oct 2015), Place on the USPSTF list of preventative services (Sep 2016);
  , deductibles; limits the effectiveness of the cost management strategy. 
  
• Powerful Republicans counter the problematic demographic trends with a focus on:
  
• Shifting wealth from the public to the private citizens
  Johnson & Kwak argue that expanding the national debt provides a hedge against unforeseen future problems, as long as creditors are willing to continue lending.  They illustrate different approaches to managing the debt within the US over its history and of the eighteenth century administrations of England and France. 
  
  The US embodies two different political and economic systems which approach the national debt differently:
  

  • Taxes to support a sinking fund to ensure credit to leverage fiscal power in: Wars, Pandemics, Trade disputes, Hurricanes, Social programs; Starting with Hamilton, Lincoln & Chase, Wilson, FDR;
    
  • Low taxes, limited infrastructure, with risk assumed by individuals: Advocated by President's Jefferson & Madison, Reagan, George W. Bush (Gingrich); 

  Johnson & Kwak develop a model of what the US government does.  They argue that the conflicting sinking fund and low tax approaches leaves the nation 'stuck in the middle' with a future problem.  And they offer their list of 'first principles' to help assess the best approach for moving from 2012 into the future.  
  
  They conclude the question is still political.  They hope it can be resolved with an awareness of their detailed explanations.  They ask who is willing to push all the coming risk onto individuals. 
  
  Following our summary of their arguments RSS frames them from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  Historically developing within the global cotton value delivery system, key CAS features are highlighted. 
  
  
  with tax law (Dec 2017). 
  
• Using the justice system to remove poor voters from the rolls.  Removing state funded health care shifts the burden from getting sick to the individual and limits the direct pressure on the
  Johnson & Kwak argue that expanding the national debt provides a hedge against unforeseen future problems, as long as creditors are willing to continue lending.  They illustrate different approaches to managing the debt within the US over its history and of the eighteenth century administrations of England and France. 
  
  The US embodies two different political and economic systems which approach the national debt differently:
  

  • Taxes to support a sinking fund to ensure credit to leverage fiscal power in: Wars, Pandemics, Trade disputes, Hurricanes, Social programs; Starting with Hamilton, Lincoln & Chase, Wilson, FDR;
    
  • Low taxes, limited infrastructure, with risk assumed by individuals: Advocated by President's Jefferson & Madison, Reagan, George W. Bush (Gingrich); 

  Johnson & Kwak develop a model of what the US government does.  They argue that the conflicting sinking fund and low tax approaches leaves the nation 'stuck in the middle' with a future problem.  And they offer their list of 'first principles' to help assess the best approach for moving from 2012 into the future.  
  
  They conclude the question is still political.  They hope it can be resolved with an awareness of their detailed explanations.  They ask who is willing to push all the coming risk onto individuals. 
  
  Following our summary of their arguments RSS frames them from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  Historically developing within the global cotton value delivery system, key CAS features are highlighted. 
  
  
  national debt.  Additionally these actions indirectly constrain access to: Education, Quality food, Public health is the proactive planning, coordination and execution of strategies to improve and safeguard the wellbeing of the public.  Its global situation is discussed in The Great Escape by Deaton.  Public health in the US is coordinated by the PHS federally but is mainly executed at the state and local levels.  Public health includes:
  • Awareness campaigns about health threatening activities including: Smoking, Over-eating, Alcohol consumption, Contamination with poisons: lead; Joint damage from over-exercise;
    
  • Research, monitoring and control of disease agents, processes and vectors by agencies including the CDC. 
    
  • Monitoring of the public's health by institutes including the NIH.  This includes screening for cancer & heart disease. 
    
  • Development, deployment and maintenance of infrastructure including: sewers, water plants and pipes.  
  • Development, deployment and maintenance of vaccination strategies.  
  • Development, deployment and maintenance of fluoridation. 
    
  • Development, deployment and maintenance of family planning services. 
    
  • Regulation and constraint of foods, drugs and devices by agencies including the FDA.  
  , Health care; which supports the over-all strategy by weakening the social fabric needed for defense against these attacks, while energizing poor Republicans with a stigmatized outgroup to focus anger is an emotion which protects a person who has been cheated by a supposed friend.  When the exploitation of the altruism is discovered, Steven Pinker explains, the result is a drive for moralistic aggression to hurt the cheater. 
  upon and stabilizing a three tier structure.  
• The power to nominate: President; and subsequently appoint:
  
• Members of the judiciary, instantiates the contragrade flows of judiciary influences subsequent interpretation of the constitution. 
  
• Appointees to the executive branch regulators. 
  
• Regulation to enforce a competitive market in health care has repeatedly failed. 
  
• ACA is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act amended by the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (Obama care).  In part it is designed to make the health care system costs grow slower.  It aims to do this by: increasing competition between insurers and providers, offering free preventative services to limit the development of serious illnesses, constraining patients' use of expensive services, constraining the growth of payments to Medicare providers and piloting new ways for PCPs to manage patient care to keep patients away from costly E.D.s.  It funds these changes with increased taxes on the wealthy.  It follows an architecture developed by Heritage Action's Butler, Moffit, Haislmaier extended by White House OMB health policy advisor Ezekiel Emanuel & architect Jeanne Lambrew.  The Obama administration drafting team included: Bob Kocher; allowing it to integrate ideas from: Dartmouth Institute's Elliot Fischer (ACO).  The ACA did not include a Medicare buy in (May 2016).  The law includes:
  • Alterations, in title I, to how health care is paid for and who is covered.  This has been altered to ensure
    
  • Americans with preexisting conditions get health insurance cover - buttressed by mandating community rating and
    
  • That they are constrained by the individual mandate to have insurance but the requirement was supported by subsidies for the poor (those with incomes between 100 & 400% of the federal poverty line).  
  • Children, allowed to, stay on their parents insurance until 26 years of age. 
    
  • Medicare solvency improvements. 
    
  • Medicaid expansion, in title II: to poor with incomes below 138% of the federal poverty line; an expansion which was subsequently constrained by the Supreme Court's ruling making expansion an optional state government decision. 
    
  • Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) which was enforced by CMS mandated rules finalized in 2011 and effected starting Oct 2012.  
  • Medical home models.  
  • Community transformation grants support the transformation of low income stressed neighborhoods to improve their lifestyles and health. 
    
  • Qualifications for ACOs.  Organizations must:
    
  • Establish a formal legal structure with shared governance which allows the ACO to distribute shared savings payments to participating providers and suppliers. 
    
  • Participate in the MSSP for three or more years. 
    
  • Have a management structure. 
    
  • Have clinical and administrative systems. 
    
  • Include enough PCPs to care for Medicare FFS patient population (> 5000) assigned to the ACO. 
    
  • Be accountable for the quality and cost of care provided to the Medicare FFS patient population. 
    
  • Have defined processes to promote: Evidence-based medicine, Patient-centeredness, Quality reporting, Cost management, Coordination of care; 
  • Demonstrate it meets HHS patient-centeredness criteria including use of patient and caregiver assessments and individualized care plans.  
  • CMMI Medicare payment experimentation.  
  • Requirements that pharmaceutical companies must report payments made to physicians (Sunshine Act). 
    
  • A requirement that chain restaurants must report calorie counts on their menus. 
    
  competition
• Between new and incumbent insurers
  
• Between insurers and hospitals reflects
  This page discusses the effect of the network on the agents participating in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  Small world and scale free networks are considered. 
  
  network effects of ACA narrow networks - When all health insurance plans are comparable on line people are expected to choose narrower less costly plans.  This has the effect of encouraging providers and PCP to compete to be part of the narrow plan by reducing their charges and driving down the prices of the plans.  By limiting the number of providers/doctors offered in the plans the few that are included should get more business.  Across the US in 2015 39% of health plans offered in public exchanges are narrow (30 - 70% of areas providers) or ultra-narrow (30% or less of providers).  In large cities narrow networks are even more common.  Typically if consumers go outside of the choices offered in their narrow network they will be responsible for the high bills.  There are problems induced by narrow network constraints:
  • Queuing issues - while a surgeon and a hospital may be in-network other agents in an operation, such as anesthesiologists or anesthetists, may not have the same set of insurance contracts.  Even if a subset do, once these are allocated to a task the hospital must then manage a complex set of resource constraints to keep its ORs running.  If it does this by ignoring the 'out of network' status of these necessary resources the patient will be impacted by a high bill.  
  • Success is more likely when the plan maintains a broad list of PCPs but a narrow list of specialists and hospitals (Oct 2016). 
    
  
  
• Predatory incentives shift political and system focus from low cost highly effective public health strategies to high cost inefficient health care strategies 
• Employment opportunities for health care workers encourage Democratic politicians to support health care based strategies
• Profit cascades from sale of products including toxic components, align industry and politicians, through an
  This page reviews the strategy of setting up an arms race.  At its core this strategy depends on being able to alter, or take advantage of an alteration in, the genome or equivalent.  The situation is illustrated with examples from biology, high tech and politics. 
  
  evolved amplifier, to focus on supportive legislation and reduced regulation: EPA is the Environmental Protection Agency of the Federal government. 
  ; generating subsequent health problems for hospitals to diagnose and treat. 
  
• Infrastructure development opportunities encourage Democratic and Republican politicians to support health care based strategies
• Doctor & hospital presence removes constraints on business development and community growth.  
• Incentives and increased complexity drive specialization of doctors and hospitals.  Long costly training constrains the choices of medical students ensuring remuneration is a focus of their career decisions (Aug 2018). 
  
• This page reviews the strategy of setting up an arms race.  At its core this strategy depends on being able to alter, or take advantage of an alteration in, the genome or equivalent.  The situation is illustrated with examples from biology, high tech and politics. 
  
  Evolved amplification of self-regulatory power awarded to doctors, maintained by lobbying: AMA is the American Medical Association. 
  , ANA is the American nurses association. 
  ; and subsequent
• This page reviews the inhibiting effect of the value delivery system on the expression of new phenotypic effects within an agent. 
  
  Extended phenotypic alignment of doctors, pharmacists, hospitals, drug companies & their lobbying groups: NCPA is the national community pharmacists associations, a lobby for pharmacists. 
  , AHA is the American_hospital association. 
  , PhRMA;
  
• Some of the profit captured by hospitals has been invested in inefficient projections of status is a publically accepted, signal that one possesses assets: wealth, beauty, talent, expertise, access & trust of powerful people; to be able to help others. 
  with the building of grand edifices. 
  
• Infrastructure focused hospitals, offering platforms for independent doctors to utilize, compete by offering the most advanced and costly technologies.  With little price constraint, this results in rampant over-building and too much infrastructure deployment.  Integrated payer-provider configurations:
  Glenn Steele & David Feinberg review the development of the modern Geisinger healthcare business after its near collapse following the abandoned merger with Penn State AMC.  After an overview of the business, they describe how a calamity unfolding around them supported building a vision of a better US health care network.  And they explain:
  

  • How they planned out the transformation,
    
  • Leveraging an effective governance structure,
    
  • Using a strategy to gain buy in,
    
  • Enabling reengineering at the clinician patient interface. 
  • Implementing the reengineering for acute, chronic & hot spot care; to help the patients and help the physicians.  
  • Geisinger's leverage of biologics.  
  • Reengineering healing with ProvenExperience.  
  • Where Geisinger is headed next. 
    

  
  Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments on them.  We frame their ideas with complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. 
  
  
  Geisinger, Kaiser; offer an alternative where
  This page reviews the strategy of architecting an end-to-end solution in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism and its costs and benefits are discussed. 
  
  end-to-end architecting can develop with the support of HCIT is health care information technology.  The AHRQ argues HCIT consists of a complex set of technologies, policies, standards and user sets.  Technically they represent it as a set of layers: Application: CPOE, CDS, e-prescribing, eMAR, Results reporting, Electronic documentation, Interface engines, etc.; Communication: Messaging standards (HL7, ADT, NCPDP, X12, DICOM, ASTM, etc,) Coding standards (LOINC, ICD10, CPT, NDC, RxNorm, SNOMED CT, etc.), Process: HIE, MPI, HIPAA security & privacy, etc.; Device: Tablet and PC, ASP, PDAs, Bar Coding, etc.; 
  capabilities.  This alternative configuration also reduces mass production/
  Robert Pearl explains the perspectives of a health care leader and son who know that the current health care network interacts with human behavior to induce a poorly performing system that caused his father's death.  But he is confident that these problem perceptions can be changed.  Once that occurs he asserts the network will become more integrated, coordinated, collaborative, better led, and empathetic to their patients.  The supporting technology infrastructure will be made highly interoperable.  All that will reduce medical errors and make care more cost effective. 
  
  Following our summary of his arguments RSS comments on them.  We frame his ideas with complex adaptive system (CAS) theory including synergistic examples of these systems in operation.  The health care network is built out of emergent human agents.  All agents must model the signals they perceive to represent and respond to them.  Pinker explains how this occurs.  Sapolsky explains why fear and hierarchy are so significant.  He includes details of Josh Green's research on morality and death.  Charles Ferguson highlights the pernicious nature of financial incentives. 
  
  
  interface/model induced errors.  The ACA & MACRA is Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 is designed to encourage physicians to move to FFV and to link Medicare payment to quality & value.  It alters the way Medicare pays for part B physician services encouraging physicians and other ECs to conform to one of two value based payment schemes: Advanced APMs (where the EC can become a QP) or MIPS.  MACRA does not apply to hospitals which have their own meaningful use.  MACRA is designed to promote transformation and includes: Data reporting by ECs, New practice models, Changing clinical standards, and Physician evaluations; with hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties and bonuses.  It authorizes CMS to develop and deploy new rules.  It provides for PCPs in PCMHs to qualify as advanced APMs via a special lower risk pathway.  It replaced the problematic physician SGR formula. 
  attempt to
  This page reviews the strategy of setting up an arms race.  At its core this strategy depends on being able to alter, or take advantage of an alteration in, the genome or equivalent.  The situation is illustrated with examples from biology, high tech and politics. 
  
  institutionalize this end-to-end FFV is fee-for-value payment.  It may be a bundled payment for a set of services provided by a group of doctors and facilities, or full capitation.  In each case the risk has shifted from the payer to the providers of care. 
  framework through Medicare is a social insurance program that guarantees access to health insurance for Americans aged 65 and over, and younger people with disabilities and end stage renal disease or ALS.  Medicare is currently missing a cap on out-of-pocket costs and direct prescription drug coverage.  It includes:
  
  • Benefits
  • Part A: Hospital inpatient insurance.  As of Dec 2013 Medicare pays for home care in only limited circumstances, such as when a person needs temporary nursing care after a hospitalization.  Part A covers 20 days of inpatient rehabilitation at a SNF after discharge from inpatient care at a hospital. 
    
  • Part B: Medical insurance for non-hospital services including: doctor visits, tests, injectable drugs, ambulances, physical therapy;
    
  • Part C: Medicare Advantage 
  • Part D: indirect prescription drug coverage The MMA prohibits Medicare from directly negotiating drug prices. 
    
  • Eligibility
    
  • All persons 65 years of age or older who are legal residents for at least 5 years.  If they or a spouse have paid Medicare taxes for 10 years the Medicare part A payments are waived.  Medicare is legislated to become the primary health plan. 
    
  • Persons under 65 with disabilities who receive SSDI. 
    
  • Persons with specific medical conditions:
  • Have end stage renal disease or need a kidney transplant. 
    
  • They have ALS. 
    
  • Some beneficiaries are dual eligible. 
    
  • Part A requires the person has been admitted as an inpatient at a hospital.  This is constrained by a rule that they stay for three days after admission.  
    
  • Sign-up
  • Part A has automatic sign-up if the person is drawing social security.  Otherwise the person must sign-up for Part A and Part B. 
    
  • Should sign-up for Part B during the Initial Enrollment Period, of seven months centered around 65th birthday, online or at a social security office.  But if still covered by spouse's insurance or not yet retired then may only join during the 3 month general enrollment period (January to March) each year, with coverage initiated the following July.  Incremental yearly 10% penalties apply for not signing up at 65.  These penalties apply to all subsequent premiums. 
    
  • Premiums
  • Part A premium
  • Part B insurance premium
    
  • Part C & D premiums are set by the commercial insurer.  
  payer data linked ACO is an Accountable Care Organization. These are accredited bundles of companies which together try to offer Dartmouth-Hitchcock like business models (Dec 2015, Sep 2016) focused on wellness, improving the provision of primary care to a large group of Medicare patients, and rewarding doctors for preventing problems.  Advocate health illustrates the idea.  Robert Pearl notes that the transition is difficult: hospitals that find their efficiency improving should reduce the number of doctors they utilize.  But any doctors that are pushed out of the ACO will likely take their patients with them, undermining the revenues that support the FFV business.  The ACA regulates qualification to be a Medicare ACO.  Individual organizations within a Medicare shared savings ACO continue to submit their own claims and are paid by Medicare for FFS.  But the ACO is eligible for shared savings.  Within the shared savings program the CMS innovation center has setup advanced payment ACOs.  As an alternative to shared savings, in a Pioneer ACO, over time 50% of the FFS payments flow directly to the ACO as a bundled payment.  CMS has established quality measures for ACOs for Medicare.  The CMS program's purpose is to reward providers for reducing total cost of care for patients through prevention, disease management, and coordination. 
  
  • CMS initiated its Physician Group Practice Demonstration in 2005.  By 2008 the congressional budget office reported on Bonus-eligible organizations. 
    
  • CMS defines ACOs as organizations that "create incentives for health care providers to work together to treat an individual patient across care settings - including doctors' offices, hospitals and long-term care facilities."
  • CMS has developed APMs which include ACOs, and advanced APMs where the ACOs must be risk bearing. 
    
  • CMMI accepts providers' proposals to test various payment systems including shared savings and partial capitation.  
  • Private market ACOs have formed including: Providence Health & Services, Blue Shield California, Anthem Blue Cross, United Health Care, BCBS Minnesota, BCBS Illinois, Humana, CIGNA, Main Health Management Coalition, BCBS Massachusetts, Aetna.  
  s. 
  
• PCP is a Primary Care Physician.  PCPs are viewed by legislators and regulators as central to the effective management of care.  When coordinated care had worked the PCP is a key participant.  In most successful cases they are central.  In certain Medicare ACO models (Pioneer) PCPs are committed to achieve meaningful use requirements.  Working against this is the: replacement of diagnostic skills by technological solutions, low FFS leverage of the PCP compared to specialists, demotivation of battling prior authorization for expensive treatments. 
  's business model is disrupting (Apr 2018)
  
• The
  Flows of different kinds are essential to the operation of complex adaptive systems (CAS). 
  Example flows are outlined.  Constraints on flows support the emergence of the systems.  Examples of constraints are discussed. 
  
  flows of supplies to hospitals has evolved to maximize power.  Hospital group purchasing and supply/distribution consolidation have resulted in shortages, and gaming. 
  
• Generic pharmaceutical manufacturers pricing power is constrained by distribution consolidation.  Some drug manufacturers are exiting the business and cost issues undermine production schedules (Feb 2019)
  
• The conflation of science with medical practice and drug development is leveraged to limit government constraints: Outcomes-based contracts require suppliers to return money to the health system if the drugs fail to work as expected.  Typically drug makers pay rebates to insurers based on the number of drugs sold.  The manufacturers gain easier access to insurers' members for their products.  It appears unlikely that outcomes-based contracts reduce prescription drug prices (Jul 2017). 
  ;
  
• The commercialization of each significant stage of life of the US population has both improved wellbeing is described by Angus Deaton as all the things that are good for a person:
  • Material wellbeing includes income and wealth and its measures: GDP, personal income and consumption.  It can be traded for goods and services which recapture time.  Material wellbeing depends on investments in:
  • Infrastructure
    
  • Physical
    
  • Property rights, contracts and dispute resolution
    
  • People and their education
    
  • Capturing of basic knowledge via science.  
  • Engineering to turn science into goods and services and then continuously improve them. 
    
  • Physical and psychological wellbeing are represented by health and happiness; and education and the ability to participate in civil society through democracy and the rule of law.  Life expectancy as a measure of population health, highly weights reductions in child mortality. 
    
  and gradually increased the
  Barriers are particular types of constraints on flows.  They can enforce separation of a network of agents allowing evolution to build diversity.  Examples of different types of barriers: physical barriers, chemical molecules can form membranes, probability based, cell membranes can include controllable channels, eukaryotes leverage membranes, symbiosis, human emotions, chess, business; and their effects are described. 
  
  barriers to success.  Education and health care have become essential services and a source of significant debt.  The proximate environment has become more uncertain is when a factor is hard to measure because it is dependent on many interconnected agents and may be affected by infrastructure and evolved amplifiers.  This is different from Risk.   and stressful is a multi-faceted condition reflecting high cortisol levels.  Dr. Robert Sapolsky's studies of baboons indicate that stress helps build readiness for fight or flight.  As these actions occur the levels of cortisol return to the baseline rate.  A stressor is anything that disrupts the regular homeostatic balance.  The stress response is the array of neural and endocrine changes that occur to respond effectively to the crisis and reestablish homeostasis. 
  
  • The short term response to the stressor
    
  • activates the amygdala which: Stimulates the brain stem resulting in inhibition of the parasympathetic nervous system and activation of the sympathetic nervous system with the hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine deployed around the body, Activates the PVN which generates a cascade resulting in glucocorticoid secretion to: get energy to the muscles with increased blood pressure for a powerful response.  The brain's acuity and cognition are stimulated.  The immune system is stimulated with beta-endorphin and repair activities curtail.  But when the stressor is
    
  • long term: loneliness, debt; and no action is necessary, or possible, long term damage ensues.  Damage from such stress may only occur in specific situations: Nuclear families coping with parents moving in.  Sustained stress provides an evolved amplifier of a position of dominance and status.  It is a strategy in female aggression used to limit reproductive competition.  Sustained stress:
    
  • Stops the frontal cortex from ensuring we do the harder thing, instead substituting amplification of the individual's propensity for risk-taking and impairing risk assessment! 
    
  • Activates the integration between the thalamus and amygdala. 
    
  • Acts differently on the amygdala in comparison to the frontal cortex and hippocampus: Stress strengthens the integration between the Amygdala and the hippocampus, making the hippocampus fearful. 
    
  • BLA & BNST respond with increased BDNF levels and expanded dendrites persistently increasing anxiety and fear conditioning. 
    
  • Makes it easier to learn a fear association and to consolidate it into long-term memory.  Sustained stress makes it harder to unlearn fear by making the prefrontal cortex inhibit the BLA from learning to break the fear association and weakening the prefrontal cortex's hold over the amygdala.  And glucocorticoids decrease activation of the medial prefrontal cortex during processing of emotional faces.  Accuracy of assessing emotions from faces suffers.  A terrified rat generating lots of glucocorticoids will cause dendrites in the hippocampus to atrophy but when it generates the same amount from excitement of running on a wheel the dendrites expand.  The activation of the amygdala seems to determine how the hippocampus responds. 
    
  • Depletes the nucleus accumbens of dopamine biasing rats toward social subordination and biasing humans toward depression. 
    
  • Disrupts working memory by amplifying norepinephrine signalling in the prefrontal cortex and amygdala to prefrontal cortex signalling until they become destructive.  It also desynchronizes activation in different frontal lobe regions impacting shifting of attention.  
  • Increases the risk of autoimmune disease (Jan 2017) 
  • During depression, stress inhibits dopamine signalling.  
  • Strategies for stress reduction include: Mindfulness. 
    
  for the majority.  
• The connection of Amazon's ecommerce network to the pharmaceutical sub-network introduces the possibility of
  This page reviews Christensen's disruption of a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism is discussed with examples from biology and business. 
  
  disruption.  
• ESRD is end-stage renal disease.  This is the last stage of CKD.  It is associated with adolescents who have hypertension.  There are more than 200,000 cases a year in the U.S.  Richard Nixon encouraged and signed Social Security amendments that provided Medicare for anyone suffering from ESRD.  There are two main treatment strategies:
  1. Kidney transplants allow recovery from the disease but are limited by the availability of matching donated kidneys, enabled by UNOS, and the patient's awareness of the option to have a transplant.  
  2. Kidney dialysis performed at a dialysis center. 
     
  has increased significantly in the population, but still affects a very small percentage.  Dialysis has a powerful treatment, and supply chain, encouraged by statutory Medicare funding, but has poor outcomes for patients.  
• The baby boomer demographic retirement bulge will stress the economy is a human SuperOrganism complex adaptive system (CAS) which operates and controls trade flows within a rich niche.  Economics models economies.  Robert Gordon has described the evolution of the American economy.  Like other CAS economic flows are maintained far from equilibrium by: demand, financial flows and constraints, supply infrastructure constraints, political and military constraints; ensuring wealth, legislative control, legal contracts and power have significant leverage through evolved amplifiers. 
  while increasing demand for long term care. 
  
• The US population now associates health problems with technological solutions provided by the health care network.  Health care agents: Politicians, Academics, NIH is the National Institute of Health, Bethesda Maryland.  It is the primary federal agency for the support and conduct of biomedical and behavioral research.  It is also one of the four US special containment units of the CDC.  , Drug companies, Hospitals, Physicians, Pharmacists; reinforce this view.  
• The
  This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism and its emergence are discussed. 
  
  evolved dopamine is a synaptic signal supporting generalized goal-directed behavior & anticipation of reward.  Its significance is that the receptors that detect the signal are of the slow acting type and are used to alter (modulate) the response of fast acting dopaminergic neural circuits in which the receptors are deployed (LTP).  The signal detects significant changes including predictions of models and actual results which differ unexpectedly.  The dopamine network architecture is designed to signal the possibility of any type of reward: Norm violation punishment, Winning a lottery, & Misfortune of an envied competitor.  Dopamine signalling:
  
  • Rescales continuously to accommodate the range of intensity offered by different stimuli.  So dopamine's responses to any reward habituate.  GABA is released by some tegmental neurons to induce habituation. 
    
  • Reflects the anticipation of reward.  It supports establishment of a relationship between a signal, working for a reward and obtaining the reward, but subsequently dopamine is mainly released encouraging the work, right after the signal supporting anticipation of the reward.  Anticipation requires learning and is reflected in hippocampus activity.  That explains context dependent cravings.  And the learning architecture means reliable cues become rewarding.  The accumbens supports willpower.  And dopamine
    
  • Promotes goal-oriented behavior needed to obtain & likely to achieve the reward - through the dopamine projections to the prefrontal cortex.  That makes dopamine central to:
    
  • Motivation.  This binding fails in depression - due to stress and in anxiety - due to signals from the amygdala.  
  • The prefrontal cortex's mesocortically stimulated support for willpower to act to delay rewards.  To sustain work for delayed rewards additional dopamine is released based on the length of the delay and the rewards uncertainty (modelled in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex - which promotes the long term and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex - which promotes the short term) and the anticipated size of the reward (modelled in the accumbens).  Impulsiveness in ADHD is reflected in abnormal dopamine processing.  Addictive drugs bias the dopamine network towards impulsiveness.  
  • Is lowered by certain gene variants which induce: less dopamine in the synapse, fewer receptors, lower responsiveness of receptors; associated with (as tiny effects in hugely varying social scenarios): sensation seeking, risk taking, attentional problems, extroversion; where:
    
  • The receptor D4's gene shows high variability.  The D47R form is relatively unresponsive to dopamine.  
  • Dopamine is degraded by COMT.  The COMT gene includes a variant which is highly efficient reducing dopamine signalling but with complicating gene/environment interactions.  
  • Dopamine is removed from the synapse by a reuptake transporter DAT. 
    
  Read Montague explores how brains make decisions.  In particular he explains how:
  

  • Evolution can create indirect abstract models, such as the dopamine system, that allow
    
  • Life changing real-time decisions to be made, and how
    
  • Schematic structures provide encodings of computable control structures which operate through and on incomputable, schematically encoded, physically active structures and operationally associated production functions. 
  goal based reward system offers the health care network a highly profitable, self-reinforcing product -- opioids -- with demand which becomes self-reinforcing.  Drug manufacturers have obtained large profits from over-subscription, but like the triangular opium trade of prior centuries, the results have been highly destructive for many patients.  
• The addictive nature of opioids combined with this
  This page reviews the strategy of setting up an arms race.  At its core this strategy depends on being able to alter, or take advantage of an alteration in, the genome or equivalent.  The situation is illustrated with examples from biology, high tech and politics. 
  
  evolved amplifier: EPAEDE is the ensuring patient access and effective drug enforcement act of 2016.  It allows patients' access to necessary medications including opioid painkillers (Sep 2015).  And it constrains the powers of the DEA to intervene (May 2016).  It establishes a process for federal agencies to go through before a distribution center can be shut down.  Sponsors include Senators Orrin Hatch and Sheldon Whitehouse and Representatives Tom Marino and Peter Welch. 
  ; supports huge protected profits and public health is the proactive planning, coordination and execution of strategies to improve and safeguard the wellbeing of the public.  Its global situation is discussed in The Great Escape by Deaton.  Public health in the US is coordinated by the PHS federally but is mainly executed at the state and local levels.  Public health includes:
  • Awareness campaigns about health threatening activities including: Smoking, Over-eating, Alcohol consumption, Contamination with poisons: lead; Joint damage from over-exercise;
    
  • Research, monitoring and control of disease agents, processes and vectors by agencies including the CDC. 
    
  • Monitoring of the public's health by institutes including the NIH.  This includes screening for cancer & heart disease. 
    
  • Development, deployment and maintenance of infrastructure including: sewers, water plants and pipes.  
  • Development, deployment and maintenance of vaccination strategies.  
  • Development, deployment and maintenance of fluoridation. 
    
  • Development, deployment and maintenance of family planning services. 
    
  • Regulation and constraint of foods, drugs and devices by agencies including the FDA.  
  issues.  
• The adoption of an authoritarian white uniform:
• Encourages hierarchic decision making, rather than collaboration. 
  
• Distorts the decision making process, encouraging hierarchic obedience and aligning judgments around
  Robert Pearl explains the perspectives of a health care leader and son who know that the current health care network interacts with human behavior to induce a poorly performing system that caused his father's death.  But he is confident that these problem perceptions can be changed.  Once that occurs he asserts the network will become more integrated, coordinated, collaborative, better led, and empathetic to their patients.  The supporting technology infrastructure will be made highly interoperable.  All that will reduce medical errors and make care more cost effective. 
  
  Following our summary of his arguments RSS comments on them.  We frame his ideas with complex adaptive system (CAS) theory including synergistic examples of these systems in operation.  The health care network is built out of emergent human agents.  All agents must model the signals they perceive to represent and respond to them.  Pinker explains how this occurs.  Sapolsky explains why fear and hierarchy are so significant.  He includes details of Josh Green's research on morality and death.  Charles Ferguson highlights the pernicious nature of financial incentives. 
  
  
  health care models with poor outcomes as highlighted by Robert Pearl. 
  
• About 5% of the patient base generates 50% of the costs of health care.  A focus on these hot spot is a highly connected agent with an outsize influence.  In medicine these are very high cost patients often with very poor personal health care strategies (Sep 2017). The logic of hot spots is reviewed by Atul Gawande.  Glenn Steele & David Feinberg describe how Geisinger has successfully identified and reduced the cost impact of its hot spot patients.  Robert Pearl argues the strategy has limited applicability in the current health care network.  He asserts a revolution can/must happen that will help this strategy to become broadly applicable.  Ezekiel Emanuel asserts practice transformations have allowed chronic care operations: CareMore; to identify and support hotspot patients in the community. 
  patients has had some success in reducing costs. 
  
• Mental illness is still a significant challenge for the mental health system.  Huge numbers of people suffer from: Depression is a debilitating state which is facilitated by genetic predisposition - for example genes coding for relatively low serotonin levels; and an accumulation of traumatic events.  There is evidence of shifts in the sleep/wake cycle in affected individuals (Dec 2015).  The affected person will experience a pathological sense of loss of control, prolonged sadness, irritability, sleep disturbances, loss of appetite, and inability to experience pleasure.  Michael Pollan concludes depression is fear of the past.  It affects 12% of men and 20% of women.  It appears to be associated with androgen deprivation therapy treatment for prostate cancer (Apr 2016).  Chronic stress depletes the nucleus accumbens of dopamine, biasing humans towards depression.  Depression easily leads to following unhealthy pathways: drinking, overeating; which increase the risk of heart disease.   It has been associated with an aging related B12 deficiency (Sep 2016).  During depression, stress mediates inhibition of dopamine signalling.  There is an association between depression and particular brain regions: Hippocampal dendrite and spine number reductions, Dorsal raphe nucleus linked to loneliness, Abnormalities of the ACC.  Childhood adversity can increase depression risk by linking recollections of uncontrollable situations to overgeneralizations that life will always be terrible and uncontrollable.  Treatments include: CBT, UMHS depression management.  As of 2010 drug treatments take weeks to facilitate a response & many patients do not respond to the first drug applied, often prolonging the agony.   Genomic predictions of which treatment will be effective have not been possible because: Not all clinical depressions are the same, a standard definition of drug response is difficult;, Anxiety is manifested in the amygdala mediating inhibition of dopamine rewards.  Major anxiety results in elevated glucocorticoids and reduces hippocampal dendrite & spine density.  Some estrogen receptor variants are associated with anxiety in women.  Michael Pollan concludes anxiety is fear of the future.  ; with little progress in effective treatment. 
  
• Integration of health products with marketing networks have transformed the populations attitude to cleanliness.  The
  Kevin Kruse argues that from 1930 onwards the corporate elite and the Republican party have developed and relentlessly executed strategies to undermine Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.  Their successful strategy used the credibility of conservative religious leaders to:
  

  • Demonstrate religious issues with the New Deal. 
    
  • Integrate the corporate elite and evangelicals. 
    
  • Use the power of corporate advertising and Hollywood to reeducate the American people to view the US as historically religious and the New Deal and liberalism as anti-religious socialism. 
  • Focus the message through evangelicals including Vereide and Graham. 
    
  • Centralize the strategy through President Eisenhower. 
    
  • Add religious elements to mainstream American symbols: money, pledge;
  • Push for prayer in public school
    
  • Push Congress to promote prayer
    
  • Make elections more about religious positions. 
    

  
  Following our summary of his arguments RSS frames them from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  Strategy is the art of the possible.  But it also depends on persistence. 
  
  
  strategic coordination of:
  Charles Ferguson argues that the US power structure has become highly corrupt. 
  
  Ferguson identifies key events which contributed to the transformation:
  

  • Junk bonds, 
  • Derivative deregulation, 
  • CMOs, ABS and analyst fraud,
    
  • Financial network deregulation,
    
  • Financial network consolidation, 
  • Short term incentives
    

  Subsequently the George W. Bush administration used the situation to build a global bubble, which Wall Street leveraged.  The bursting of the bubble: managed by the Bush Administration and Bernanke Federal Reserve; was advantageous to some. 
  
  Ferguson concludes that the restructured and deregulated financial services industry is damaging to the American economy.  And it is supported by powerful, incentive aligned academics.   He sees the result being a rigged system. 
  
  Ferguson offers his proposals for change and offers hope that a charismatic young FDR will appear. 
  
  Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  Once the constraints are removed from CAS amplifiers, it becomes advantageous to leverage the increased flows.  And it is often relatively damaging not to participate.  Corruption and parasitism can become entrenched. 
  
  
  Finance, Government, Marketing, News, Entertainment; supports and
  Flows of different kinds are essential to the operation of complex adaptive systems (CAS). 
  Example flows are outlined.  Constraints on flows support the emergence of the systems.  Examples of constraints are discussed. 
  
  controls this flow.  
• The focus on cleanliness and the reduction in family size has changed the development is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent.  It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents.  That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment.  Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS.  In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult.  In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete. 
  environment for babies and children.  This is changing the developing children's microbiomes, the trillions of bacteria and viruses that live inside higher animals' guts, on their skin etc.  These bacteria and viruses seem to play a role in: immune responses, digesting food, making nutrients, controlling mental health and maintaining a healthy weight.  The signals from the gut microbiota are relayed by major nerve fibers: vagus; to the central nervous system.  The symbiotic relationship must be actively managed.  Human armpits include glands which provide food favoring certain symbionts who build a defensive shield above the skin.  In the human gut: Barriers are setup: Mucus secretions form a physical constraint and provide sites for bacteriophages to anchor and attack pathogenic bacteria; Symbiont tailored nourishment: Plant-heavy food creates opportunities for fibre specialists like Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron; is provided, Selective binding sites are provided, Poisons are deployed against the unwelcome, and Temperature, acidity and oxygenation are managed.    High throughput sequencing allows the characterization of bacterial populations inside guts.  Beginning at birth, as they pass down the birth canal infants are supplied with a microbiome from their mothers.  If they are borne via cesarean they never receive some of the key bacteria: Bifidobaterium infantis which is also dependent on oligosaccharides in breast milk; from their mothers.  A variety of diseases may be caused by changes in the microbiome:
  • Eczema can be related to changes in the skin microbiome. 
    
  • Obesity can be induced by changes to the gut microbiome.  
  • Chronic inflammation
    
  • Allergies
    
  • Type 1 diabetes
    
  , increasing skin and immune system has to support and protect an inventory of host cell types, detect and respond to invaders and maintain the symbiont equilibrium within the microbiome.  It detects microbes which have breached the secreted mucus barrier, driving them back and fortifying the barrier.  It culls species within the microbiome that are expanding beyond requirements.  It destroys invaders who make it into the internal transport networks.  As part of its initialization it has immune cells which suppress the main system to allow the microbiome to bootstrap.  The initial microbiome is tailored by the antibodies supplied from the mother's milk while breastfeeding.  The immune system consists of two main parts the older non-adaptive part and the newer adaptive part.  The adaptive part achieves this property by being schematically specified by DNA which is highly variable.  By rapid reproduction the system recombines the DNA variable regions in vast numbers of offspring cells which once they have been shown not to attack the host cell lines are used as templates for interacting with any foreign body (antigen).  When the immune cell's DNA hyper-variable regions are expressed as y-shaped antibody proteins they typically include some receptor like structures which match the surfaces of the typical antigen.  Once the antibody becomes bound to the antigen the immune system cells can destroy the invader. 
  problems. 
  
• The addictive nature of opioids combined with this
  This page reviews the strategy of setting up an arms race.  At its core this strategy depends on being able to alter, or take advantage of an alteration in, the genome or equivalent.  The situation is illustrated with examples from biology, high tech and politics. 
  
  evolved amplifier: EPAEDE is the ensuring patient access and effective drug enforcement act of 2016.  It allows patients' access to necessary medications including opioid painkillers (Sep 2015).  And it constrains the powers of the DEA to intervene (May 2016).  It establishes a process for federal agencies to go through before a distribution center can be shut down.  Sponsors include Senators Orrin Hatch and Sheldon Whitehouse and Representatives Tom Marino and Peter Welch. 
  ; supports huge protected profits and public health is the proactive planning, coordination and execution of strategies to improve and safeguard the wellbeing of the public.  Its global situation is discussed in The Great Escape by Deaton.  Public health in the US is coordinated by the PHS federally but is mainly executed at the state and local levels.  Public health includes:
  • Awareness campaigns about health threatening activities including: Smoking, Over-eating, Alcohol consumption, Contamination with poisons: lead; Joint damage from over-exercise;
    
  • Research, monitoring and control of disease agents, processes and vectors by agencies including the CDC. 
    
  • Monitoring of the public's health by institutes including the NIH.  This includes screening for cancer & heart disease. 
    
  • Development, deployment and maintenance of infrastructure including: sewers, water plants and pipes.  
  • Development, deployment and maintenance of vaccination strategies.  
  • Development, deployment and maintenance of fluoridation. 
    
  • Development, deployment and maintenance of family planning services. 
    
  • Regulation and constraint of foods, drugs and devices by agencies including the FDA.  
  issues.  
• Supplements and cosmetics can provide concentrated amounts of biologically active chemicals to consumers.  These supplements can interact with pharmaceuticals in complex ways. 
  
• Huge public investments in health, by political leaders, have seen significant returns in control of and response to: Infectious diseases, Cardiovascular disease; but little from the war-on-cancer until the development of immuno-oncology uses the immune system to treat cancer.  Cancer cells often have different molecules on their cell surface.  Studies have shown that genetic signatures of tumors can help predict which patients will benefit from treatment with PD-1 checkpoint inhibitors.  Checkpoint inhibitor based treatments aim to make the immune system target these antigens.  Clinical trial results indicate they are prolonging lives - even if only by a few months.  They have reduced side effects relative to generic chemo therapy.  There are three main strategies: cellular, antibody and cytokine.  
  • Antibody therapies target receptors including CD20, CD274, CD279 and CTLA-4.  These therapies include MABs: Alemtuzumab, Ofatumumab, Rituximab; and may induce checkpoint inhibition.
    
  • Cellular therapies have typically involved removing the immune cells from the blood or a tumor, activating, culturing and then returning them to the patient.  Trials of these CAR and TCR therapies are proceeding, with some significant problems (Jul 2016). 
    
  • Cytokine therapies enhance anti-tumor activity through the cytokine's regulation and coordination of the immune system. 
    
  • Vaccines, including Sipuleucel-T for prostate cancer and BCG, classically a vaccine for tuberculosis, which is used for treating bladder cancer. 
    
  .  Until recently dementia is a classification of memory impairment, constrained feelings and enfeebled or extinct intellect.  The most common form for people under 60 is FTD.  Dementia has multiple causes including: vascular disease (inducing VCI) including strokes, head trauma, syphilis and mercury poisoning for treating syphilis, alcoholism, B12 deficiency (Sep 2016), privation, Androgen deprivation therapy (Oct 2016), stress, Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, and prion infections such as CJD and kuru.  The condition is typically chronic and treatment long term (Laguna Honda ward) and is predicted by Stanley Prusiner to become a major burden on the health system.  It may be possible to constrain the development some forms of dementia by: physical activity, hypertension management, and ongoing cognitive training.  Dementia appears to develop faster in women than men.   obtained little investment. 
  
• Public health benefits have
  Deaton describes the wellbeing of people around the world today.  He explains the powerful benefit of public health strategies and the effect of growth in material wellbeing but also the corrosive effects of aid. 
  
  Following our summary of Deaton's arguments RSS comments from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  The situation he describes is complex including powerful amplifiers, alignment and incentives that overlap broadly with other RSS summaries of adaptations of: The biosphere, Politics, Economics, Philosophy and Health care. 
  
  
  improved wellbeing driving up life expectancy is a measure of the average life time of a new born baby.  Without public health assistance many children die in the first five years of life significantly lowering the life expectancy of the whole group.  There are representational and data capture problems with the model:
  
  • Not knowing the risk of dying in the newborn's future, demographers use the risks present at that time to predict impacts in the future of the person.  No adjustment can be made for increased wellbeing. 
    
  • Saving the lives of children has a far larger effect on increasing life expectancy than extending the lives of the elderly
    
  • Impacts that occur in a particular year, such as a epidemic or pandemic, are treated as permanent effects for that years life expectancy even though they may be handled by public health strategies and hence be transients.  For life expectancy calculations in subsequent years the impact is ignored.  
  • Programs that reduced the impacts of infectious diseases, such as antibiotics and vaccine deployment, have reduced the variability of life expectancy following their introduction.  
  • Vital registration systems gather accurate data for life expectancy.  But most countries do not have the infrastructure and instead estimates are generated from demographic and health surveys. 
    
  .  This shift has encouraged the transformation of the family from extended to nuclear, and reduced the average number of children. 
  
• Smaller families and a shift in environment from farms to sterile urban homes has transformed the proximate environment of infants and their microbiomes, the trillions of bacteria and viruses that live inside higher animals' guts, on their skin etc.  These bacteria and viruses seem to play a role in: immune responses, digesting food, making nutrients, controlling mental health and maintaining a healthy weight.  The signals from the gut microbiota are relayed by major nerve fibers: vagus; to the central nervous system.  The symbiotic relationship must be actively managed.  Human armpits include glands which provide food favoring certain symbionts who build a defensive shield above the skin.  In the human gut: Barriers are setup: Mucus secretions form a physical constraint and provide sites for bacteriophages to anchor and attack pathogenic bacteria; Symbiont tailored nourishment: Plant-heavy food creates opportunities for fibre specialists like Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron; is provided, Selective binding sites are provided, Poisons are deployed against the unwelcome, and Temperature, acidity and oxygenation are managed.    High throughput sequencing allows the characterization of bacterial populations inside guts.  Beginning at birth, as they pass down the birth canal infants are supplied with a microbiome from their mothers.  If they are borne via cesarean they never receive some of the key bacteria: Bifidobaterium infantis which is also dependent on oligosaccharides in breast milk; from their mothers.  A variety of diseases may be caused by changes in the microbiome:
  • Eczema can be related to changes in the skin microbiome. 
    
  • Obesity can be induced by changes to the gut microbiome.  
  • Chronic inflammation
    
  • Allergies
    
  • Type 1 diabetes
    
  .  
• Antibiotic are compounds which kill bacteria, molds, etc.  Sulfur dye stuffs were found to be effective antibiotics.  The first evolved antibiotic discovered was penicillin.  Antibiotics are central to modern health care supporting the processes of: Surgery, Wound management, Infection control; which makes the development of antibiotic resistance worrying.  Antibiotics are:
  • Economically problematic to develop and sell. 
    
  • Congress enacted GAIN to encourage development of new antibiotics.  But it has not developed any market-entry award scheme, which seems necessary to encourage new antibiotic R&D. 
    
  • Medicare has required hospitals and SNFs to execute plans to ensure correct use of antibiotics & prevent the spread of drug-resistant infections.  
  • C.D.C. is acting to stop the spread of resistant infections and reduce unnecessary use of antibiotics.  
    
  • F.D.A. has simplified approval standards.  It is working with industry to limit use of antibiotics in livestock. 
    
  • BARDA is promoting public-private partnerships to support promising research.
    
  • Impacting the microbiome of the recipient.  Stool banking is a solution  (Sloan-Kettering stool banking).  
  • Associated with obesity, although evidence suggests childhood obesity relates to the infections not the antibiotic treatments (Nov 2016). 
    
  • Monitored globally by W.H.O.
    
  • Regulated in the US by the F.D.A. who promote voluntary labeling by industry to discourage livestock fattening (Dec 2013).  
  • Customer demands have more effect - Perdue shifts to no antibiotics in premier chickens (Aug 2015). 
    
  integration in health care and agriculture has supported the development of valuable processes.  But the resulting pressure on microbes has selected for resistant variants results from plasmids and R factors: NDN1; which encode resistance properties for otherwise lethal antibiotics.  World leaders hope cooperation can preserve the power of last resort antibiotics: Carbapenems, Colistin (Oct 2016).  Worrying trends include: CRE (May 2016), C. diff (May 2015), MDR & XDR TB; resulting in increased risk of sepsis and death.  The World Bank estimates full resistance would reduce the global economy in 2050 by between 1.1 and 3.8%. 
  : C. diff usually competes with other bacteria in the human gut microbiome.  But antibiotic treatments provide it with an advantage where it becomes the predominant gut bacteria causing diarrhea, abdominal pain, and toxic megacolon.  Repeated treatments select for infections that are progressively more difficult to treat.  C. difficile infections kill more than 25,000 people a year in the US.  Fecal transplants, especially enabled by stool-banking, reintroduce competitive bacteria that limit the success of C. difficile and cure patients with previously recurrent infections.  But the F.D.A. has not approved such transplants as a treatment and the procedure is not covered by insurance. 
  
  , MRSA is methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus
  , XDR TB is extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis.  It requires very toxic and costly drugs to treat.  Most patients die.  ; that now threaten the business models and patient's lives. 
  
• Purging of the gut microbiome to assist with medical tests, without backup and reintroduction, undermines the generally symbiotic is a long term situation between two, or more, different agents where the resources of both are shared for mutual benefit.  Some of the relationships have built remarkable dependencies: Tremblaya's partnership with citrus mealybugs and bacterial DNA residing in the mealybug's genome, Aphids with species of secondary symbiont bacteria deployed sexually from a male aphid sperm reservoir and propagated asexually by female aphids only while their local diet induces a dependency.  If the power relations and opportunities change for the participants then they will adapt and the situation may transform into separation, predation or parasitism. 
  relationship between microbes and human host. 
  
• Medical errors, misdiagnosis, overdiagnosis is identification of disease when no symptoms or impacts will occur.  It typically results from false positives during screening (Aug 2016).  It can result in unnecessary and problematic treatment. 
  , under-treatment, overtreatment is the application of unnecessary health care.  It is a complex problem:
  • Overtreatment needs to be adaptive.  As people age their medicine levels typically need to be changed.  Often, as in the case of blood pressure, and blood sugar reduction, they should be reduced to avoid inducing falls (Nov 2015).  
  • Patients with chronic diseases, such as type 2 diabetes, often require different treatment settings.  And again these vary with age. 
    
  • Patients who have learned a regime, and been told it was successful, may resist instructions to change it.  Some worry that they will impact their health care provider's treatment performance measures. 
    
  , medication adherence failures, and insurance to cover the agents of the health care network from legal actions concerning these issues generates costs and induces secrecy, under-reporting of problems and undermines
  Walter Shewhart's iterative development process is found in many complex adaptive systems (CAS).  The mechanism is reviewed and its value in coping with random events is explained. 
  
  Shewhart cycle improvements.   FFS is fee-for-service payment.  For health care providers the high profits were made in hospitalizations, imaging and surgery.  Due to its inducing excessive treatment activity it may be replaced by FFV bundled payment.   reimbursement is the payment process for much of US health care.  Reimbursement is the centralizing mechanism in the US Health care network.  It associates reward flows with central planning requirements such as HITECH.  Different payment methods apportion risk differently between the payer and the provider.  The payment methods include:
  • Fee-for-service,
    
  • Per Diem,
    
  • Episode of Care Payment, 
  • Multi-provider bundled EPC,
    
  • Condition-specific capitation,
    
  • Full capitation.  
  undermines system wide analysis and solutions. 
  
• Technological development continues to provide health care with powerful, but mostly unrealizable, marketing signals. 
  
• Pharmaceutical innovation is the economic realization of invention and combinatorial exaptation.  While highly innovative, monopolies: AT&T, IBM; usually have limited economic reach, constraining productivity.  This explains the use of regulation, or even its threat, that can check their power and drive the creations across the economy. 
  is constrained by niche strategies & strong regulation. 
  
• To scale personalized medicine will need broad support from hospital networks accepting
  This page reviews Christensen's disruption of a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism is discussed with examples from biology and business. 
  
  disruption, molecular imaging allows the visualization of cellular function and molecular processes, allowing more precise and earlier diagnosis of disease.  It extends traditional imaging by:
  
  • Using biomarkers, including Nano sensors, which interact chemically with their surroundings, to image particular targets and pathways
    
  • Leveraging deep learning to reduce the required imaging, and target it more effectively
    
  • Providing quantitative data on the imaged process or function enabling Nano medicine.  
  • Extending mass spectrometry with MALDI to allow rapid (relative to sequencing or x-ray crystallography), low cost analysis of proteins, bacteria and viruses.  
  and Big Data encompasses the IT systems and processes necessary to do population based data collection, management and analysis.  The very low cost, robust, data storage organized by infrastructure: HADOOP; allows digital data to be stored en mass.  Data scientists then apply assumptions about the world to the data, analogous to evolved mechanisms in vision, in the form of algorithms: Protein folding modeling (Feb 2019) assumes coevolutionary methods can be applied to identify contact points in a protein's tertiary structure.  Rather than depending on averages, analysis at Verisk drills down to specifics and then highlights modeling problems by identifying the underlying CAS.  For the analysis to be useful it requires a hierarchy of supporting BI infrastructure:
  • Analytics utilization and integration delivered via SaaS and the Cloud to cope with the silos and data intensive nature. 
    
  • Analytics tools (BI) for PHM will be hard to develop.  
  • Complex data models must include clinical aspects of the patient specific data, including disease state population wide.  
  • A key aspect is providing clear signals about the nature of the data using data visualization. 
    
  • Data communication with the ability to exchange and transact.  HIEs and EMPI alliance approaches are all struggling to provide effective exchange. 
    
  • Data labeling and secure access and retreival.  While HIPAA was initially drafted as a secure MPI the index was removed from the legislation leaving the US without such a tool.  Silos imply that the security architecture will need to be robust. 
    
  • Raw data scrubbing, restructuring and standardization.  Even financial data is having to be restandarized shifting from ICD-9 to -10.  The intent is to transform the unstructured data via OCR and NLP to structured records to support the analytics process. 
    
  • Raw data warehousing is distributed across silos including PCP, Hospital system and network, cloud and SaaS for process, clinical and financial data. 
    
  • Data collection from the patient's proximate environment as well as provider CPOE, EHRs, workflow and process infrastructure.  The integration of the EHR into a big data collection tool is key. 
    
  .  Its applicability also depends on two
  This page introduces the complex adaptive system (CAS) theory frame.  The theory is positioned relative to the natural sciences.  It catalogs the laws and strategies which underpin the operation of systems that are based on the interaction of emergent agents. 
  John Holland's framework for representing complexity is outlined.  Links to other key aspects of CAS theory discussed at the site are presented. 
  
  CAS-questionable assumptions being true:
1. An
   This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism and its emergence are discussed. 
   
   evolved process is
   This page discusses the strategy of modularity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The benefits, mechanism and its emergence are discussed. 
   
   modular enough that treatments can be specific.  But that is unlikely since evolved innovations leverage addressable templates for a grab bag of strategic tools which may be broadly used.  
2. Genomics combines recombinant DNA, DNA sequencing and bioinformatics  to sequence, assemble and analyse genomes.   provides an easily understood description of phenotypic implementation.  But the understanding of control networks for genes and their products is still limited and probably requires understanding complex adaptive dynamic factors.  
• HCIT is health care information technology.  The AHRQ argues HCIT consists of a complex set of technologies, policies, standards and user sets.  Technically they represent it as a set of layers: Application: CPOE, CDS, e-prescribing, eMAR, Results reporting, Electronic documentation, Interface engines, etc.; Communication: Messaging standards (HL7, ADT, NCPDP, X12, DICOM, ASTM, etc,) Coding standards (LOINC, ICD10, CPT, NDC, RxNorm, SNOMED CT, etc.), Process: HIE, MPI, HIPAA security & privacy, etc.; Device: Tablet and PC, ASP, PDAs, Bar Coding, etc.; 
  offers health care:
• Additional ways to understand the patient base
  
• New access & delivery models
• Patient portals provides web and or application based access to a patient's EHR based health care information and services.  Specific portal services are mandated by meaningful use.  They include at a minimum lab test results, problem list, medication list, and medication allergy list.   
• M-health - mobile health applications running on smart phones and other mobile devices.  It is viewed as key to improving clinical efficiency, access and cost effectiveness of treatments.  Applications will be integrated into bidirectional flows, enhancing team collaboration, as well as providing clinical information.  Both should improve decision making and reduce errors.  Hope for access at inpatient bed side, exam room.  As usual with mobility the light weight devices, extended access to confidential data and wireless connectivity work in opposition to the desire for zero latency, video streaming and conferencing, large image access, offline operation with synchronization, and strong security.  Privacy has been a major drag on adoption.  
  
• Better integration, coordination and control 
• EHR refers to electronic health records which are a synonym of EMR.  EHR analysis suggests strengths and weaknesses:
  • The EHR provides an integrated record of the health systems notes on a patient including: Diagnosis and Treatment plans and protocols followed, Prescribed drugs with doses, Adverse drug reactions;
  • The EHR does not necessarily reflect the patient's situation accurately. 
    
  • The EHR often acts as a catch-all.  There is often little time for a doctor, newly attending the patient, to review and validate the historic details. 
    
  • The meaningful use requirements of HITECH and Medicare/Medicaid specify compliance of an EHR system or EHR module for specific environments such as an ambulatory or hospital in-patient setting. 
    
  • As of 2016 interfacing with the EHR is cumbersome and undermines face-to-face time between doctor and patient.  Doctors are allocated 12 minutes to interact with a patient of which less than five minutes was used for recording hand written notes.  With the EHR 12 minutes may be required to update the record!
    
  systems are developed by commercial software developers, to conform to legislation and CMS is the centers for Medicare and Medicaid services.   regulations, providing standardized patient data to NIH is the National Institute of Health, Bethesda Maryland.  It is the primary federal agency for the support and conduct of biomedical and behavioral research.  It is also one of the four US special containment units of the CDC.   & CDC is the HHS's center for disease control and prevention based in Atlanta Georgia.  
  .  
• Transfers supported by Direct messaging is a secure messaging technology used by HIEs (& Blue Button+) to directly interoperate.  It uses SMIME body in a SMTP protocol and X.509 certification. 
  or possibly through an HIE a Health Information Exchange is responsible for the transmission of healthcare-related data among facilities, health information organizations and government agencies according to national standards.  They are designed to address legal, organizational and technical challenges that would otherwise impede the sustainability of health information interchange.  An HIE is a component of the HIT.  It must enable reliable and secure transfer of data among diverse systems and facilitate access and retrieval.  The two main types are private and public exchanges.  Private exchanges may be able to leverage homogeneous IT infrastructure to facilitate data sharing.  Public exchanges are likely to be heterogeneous.  RHIO provide the regional organizations to support such HIE.  They are there to ensure that infrastructure amplification initiates.  The government will ensure that low healthcare density areas are served by public HIE infrastructure.  Both centralized and federated technical solutions were initially considered for implementation by the RHIOs for deploying HIE as specified in the Markle Foundation's NHIN common framework.  Common framework clients such as appropriately architected HIE use SOAP messaging to interact with their local SNO's ISB and RLS.  The HIE SOAP query transactions follow the HL7 Query Model.  Alternatively some HIE's are now using direct messaging to support interoperation.  HIE deployment goals have been phased (1 - supporting care transitions, 2 - Quality and care management, 3 - Population health).  Some HIEs will support "EHR-lite" as part of their functionality.  HIE does not yet solve some difficult challenges:
  • Safeguarding the security of health information.  Currently HIEs conforming to the common framework only provide locations of clinical data held remotely.  
  • Providing effective life cycle management.  The HIE is dependent on the local set of entities to provide updates that match the current state of the entity data. 
    
  network. 
  
• RCM is either:
  
  • Restrictive cardiomyopathy, a rare disease where scar tissue makes the heart muscle rigid and reduces the efficiency.  Or
    
  • Revenue Cycle Management aligns treatment with reimbursement.  Customer service will be involved.  IT will architect the core billing, decision support and ad-hoc services, constructed by RCM vendors, into systems to support RCM.  The Hospital's central business office will aim to maximize cash recoveries.  As per Deming, mistakes in the RCM pipeline result in rework and lost cash flow and revenue of between 4 - 12%.  The staff must be trained and fully engaged in the design and operation of the pipeline.  The front end processes are best placed to capture all the information needed to make the cycle successful.  The activities include:
  • Scheduling and Appointments - where visits and procedures are booked and demographic and insurance information is collected.  If this information is incorrect it is likely the claims will not forward to third party payers.  When resources and their states are accurately known an optimal set of plans can be constructed to efficiently and effectively flow patients through the system.  But that is difficult to guarantee because of a number of interrelated problems:
  • Scale - as the number of resources increases the ability of a central scheduling system to represent all of them accurately and reliably becomes impossible. 
    
  • Ubiquity - a CAS strategy for ensuring availability is to have an over-abundance of equivalent resource that can be used for schedule allocation.  But often these resource levels are set by local decision makers who all respond at about the same time to imposed funding changes.  The effect is to suddenly and unpredictably undermine the guarantee of over-abundance.  Sometimes the assumption of equivalence also fails as in the desire of a patient to see only a specific surgeon. 
    
  • Changes can ripple through the plans requiring coordination meetings and notifications or guaranteed receipt of status updates. 
    
  • Verification checks for:
    
  • Referral - Is there PCP authorization?  Is the PCP referred service covered by the patient's plan,
    
  • Authorization - obtain Insurance authorization if required, and
    
  • Pre-certification - is there 'need' for inpatient care or other care before admission by the MCO.  Otherwise could introduce problems including not obtaining/verifying the insurance name, number and eligibility, not securing pre-certification and pre-authorization with time limits, not copying the insurance card, not checking for secondary coverage, not detecting expired referral or authorization,
    
  • Pre-registration - provide advice about their financial obligations and what documents to bring to the procedure.  If there is a copay or an outstanding payment to be paid these should be processed,
    
  • Registration - some patients are scheduled outside of the main admitting process (by OP clinic or E.D.) and this must be detected and the scheduling verification and pre-registration process be performed,
    
  • Time of service payments - co pays and self pays,
    
  • Coding - identify diagnosis (ICD 9 -> ICD-10 codes) and treatment (CPT) activities and charges for the episode.  More than 80% of hospital cases are coded in error. 
    
  • Demographics and billing data entry - enter charges and adjust capitated charges,
    
  • Patient statements - submit primary and secondary claims (following HIPAA formats) with or without involvement of a clearinghouse, produce patient statements including time of service, outstanding balance, charged amount with codes, insurance details, forms used (UB 92/04 and HCFA 1500).  A paper based claims filing has a rejection rate of 30%.  Duplicate claim payment rates of 1 - 2% of medical expenses are common.  Duplicate claims detection is often not part of the process.  Payer's goals are in conflict with Provider goals.  
    
  • Collections and payment posting - Post all payments and adjustments and deposit money into the bank,
    
  • Denials and appeals - resubmission and appeal of claims, denial analysis and bad debts and write offs.  To reduce denial rates and appeals the reimbursement contracts payer processes and actual denials must be analyzed and understood. 
    
  • Account follow up - Patient inquiries, resubmission of claims and issue refunds. 
    
  • Financial counseling;
  This page reviews the catalytic impact of infrastructure on the expression of phenotypic effects by an agent.  The infrastructure reduces the cost the agent must pay to perform the selected action.  The catalysis is enhanced by positive returns. 
  
  infrastructure amplifiers. 
  
• Additional security capabilities to counter the additional issues introduced by networking and mobile technologies.  
• But the lack of standard semantics between hospitals undermines the interoperability. 
  
• Paying for health care was supported by health insurance from early in the twentieth century: Blue Cross initially developed in the early 1930s to provide health insurance for hospital treatments.  Blue Cross introduced the mechanism of individuals paying premiums into a collective pool that a third party can then use to pay for medical expenditures.  The subscriber base was limited until World War 2 when wages were frozen and employers offered a benefit of health insurance tied to employment.  Being associated with employment made the facility regressive since those working part-time or in small businesses had to pay for services out of pocket and could induce bankruptcy. 
  , Blue Shield initially developed in the early 1930s to provide health insurance for physician visits.  ; introducing payer driven
  Terrence Deacon explores how constraints on dynamic flows can induce emergent phenomena which can do real work.  He shows how these phenomena are sustained.  The mechanism enables the development of Darwinian competition. 
  
  constraints and
  This page reviews the catalytic impact of infrastructure on the expression of phenotypic effects by an agent.  The infrastructure reduces the cost the agent must pay to perform the selected action.  The catalysis is enhanced by positive returns. 
  
  infrastructure amplifiers.  
• The Medicare is a social insurance program that guarantees access to health insurance for Americans aged 65 and over, and younger people with disabilities and end stage renal disease or ALS.  Medicare is currently missing a cap on out-of-pocket costs and direct prescription drug coverage.  It includes:
  
  • Benefits
  • Part A: Hospital inpatient insurance.  As of Dec 2013 Medicare pays for home care in only limited circumstances, such as when a person needs temporary nursing care after a hospitalization.  Part A covers 20 days of inpatient rehabilitation at a SNF after discharge from inpatient care at a hospital. 
    
  • Part B: Medical insurance for non-hospital services including: doctor visits, tests, injectable drugs, ambulances, physical therapy;
    
  • Part C: Medicare Advantage 
  • Part D: indirect prescription drug coverage The MMA prohibits Medicare from directly negotiating drug prices. 
    
  • Eligibility
    
  • All persons 65 years of age or older who are legal residents for at least 5 years.  If they or a spouse have paid Medicare taxes for 10 years the Medicare part A payments are waived.  Medicare is legislated to become the primary health plan. 
    
  • Persons under 65 with disabilities who receive SSDI. 
    
  • Persons with specific medical conditions:
  • Have end stage renal disease or need a kidney transplant. 
    
  • They have ALS. 
    
  • Some beneficiaries are dual eligible. 
    
  • Part A requires the person has been admitted as an inpatient at a hospital.  This is constrained by a rule that they stay for three days after admission.  
    
  • Sign-up
  • Part A has automatic sign-up if the person is drawing social security.  Otherwise the person must sign-up for Part A and Part B. 
    
  • Should sign-up for Part B during the Initial Enrollment Period, of seven months centered around 65th birthday, online or at a social security office.  But if still covered by spouse's insurance or not yet retired then may only join during the 3 month general enrollment period (January to March) each year, with coverage initiated the following July.  Incremental yearly 10% penalties apply for not signing up at 65.  These penalties apply to all subsequent premiums. 
    
  • Premiums
  • Part A premium
  • Part B insurance premium
    
  • Part C & D premiums are set by the commercial insurer.  
  /Medicaid is the state-federal program for the poor.  Originally part of Lyndon Johnson's 1965 Bill, eligibility and services vary by state.  Medicaid currently pays less for care than Medicare, resulting in many care providers refusing to participate in the program.  Less than 10 percent of Medicaid recipients, those in long-term care including nursing homes where 64% are dependent on Medicaid, use one-third of all Medicaid spending which is a problem.  The ACA's Medicaid expansion program, made state optional by the SCOTUS decision, was initially taken up by fifty percent of states.  As of 2016 it covers 70 million Americans at a federal cost of $350 billion a year.  In 2017 it pays for 40% of new US births. 
  PPS is Prospective payment system a method of CMS reimbursement in which a Medicare payment is made based on a predetermined fixed amount.  The amount is derived based on the classification system of that service (such as a diagnosis related group for an inpatient hospital service).  CMS uses separate PPSs for reimbursement to acute inpatient hospitals, HHAs, hospice, hospital outpatients, inpatient psychiatric facilities, IRF, LTCH and SNFs. 
  legislated integration of tax based funding with hospital based medical procedures enabled
  This page reviews the strategy of setting up an arms race.  At its core this strategy depends on being able to alter, or take advantage of an alteration in, the genome or equivalent.  The situation is illustrated with examples from biology, high tech and politics. 
  
  evolutionary amplification.  But the construction of an association between the yearly selection from a choice of plans and the subscriber's health strategies discouraged a long-term focus on wellbeing is described by Angus Deaton as all the things that are good for a person:
  • Material wellbeing includes income and wealth and its measures: GDP, personal income and consumption.  It can be traded for goods and services which recapture time.  Material wellbeing depends on investments in:
  • Infrastructure
    
  • Physical
    
  • Property rights, contracts and dispute resolution
    
  • People and their education
    
  • Capturing of basic knowledge via science.  
  • Engineering to turn science into goods and services and then continuously improve them. 
    
  • Physical and psychological wellbeing are represented by health and happiness; and education and the ability to participate in civil society through democracy and the rule of law.  Life expectancy as a measure of population health, highly weights reductions in child mortality. 
    
  by the insurer or participant.  
• ACA is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act amended by the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (Obama care).  In part it is designed to make the health care system costs grow slower.  It aims to do this by: increasing competition between insurers and providers, offering free preventative services to limit the development of serious illnesses, constraining patients' use of expensive services, constraining the growth of payments to Medicare providers and piloting new ways for PCPs to manage patient care to keep patients away from costly E.D.s.  It funds these changes with increased taxes on the wealthy.  It follows an architecture developed by Heritage Action's Butler, Moffit, Haislmaier extended by White House OMB health policy advisor Ezekiel Emanuel & architect Jeanne Lambrew.  The Obama administration drafting team included: Bob Kocher; allowing it to integrate ideas from: Dartmouth Institute's Elliot Fischer (ACO).  The ACA did not include a Medicare buy in (May 2016).  The law includes:
  • Alterations, in title I, to how health care is paid for and who is covered.  This has been altered to ensure
    
  • Americans with preexisting conditions get health insurance cover - buttressed by mandating community rating and
    
  • That they are constrained by the individual mandate to have insurance but the requirement was supported by subsidies for the poor (those with incomes between 100 & 400% of the federal poverty line).  
  • Children, allowed to, stay on their parents insurance until 26 years of age. 
    
  • Medicare solvency improvements. 
    
  • Medicaid expansion, in title II: to poor with incomes below 138% of the federal poverty line; an expansion which was subsequently constrained by the Supreme Court's ruling making expansion an optional state government decision. 
    
  • Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) which was enforced by CMS mandated rules finalized in 2011 and effected starting Oct 2012.  
  • Medical home models.  
  • Community transformation grants support the transformation of low income stressed neighborhoods to improve their lifestyles and health. 
    
  • Qualifications for ACOs.  Organizations must:
    
  • Establish a formal legal structure with shared governance which allows the ACO to distribute shared savings payments to participating providers and suppliers. 
    
  • Participate in the MSSP for three or more years. 
    
  • Have a management structure. 
    
  • Have clinical and administrative systems. 
    
  • Include enough PCPs to care for Medicare FFS patient population (> 5000) assigned to the ACO. 
    
  • Be accountable for the quality and cost of care provided to the Medicare FFS patient population. 
    
  • Have defined processes to promote: Evidence-based medicine, Patient-centeredness, Quality reporting, Cost management, Coordination of care; 
  • Demonstrate it meets HHS patient-centeredness criteria including use of patient and caregiver assessments and individualized care plans.  
  • CMMI Medicare payment experimentation.  
  • Requirements that pharmaceutical companies must report payments made to physicians (Sunshine Act). 
    
  • A requirement that chain restaurants must report calorie counts on their menus. 
    
  legislated Medicaid expansion supports increased access to the health care network.  
• Long-term care insurance has struggled to develop an effective business model. 
  
• Deming's Out Of The Crisis highlighted the cost inflation resulting from health care's expanding funding demands: The Seven Deadly Diseases (6) "Excessive medical costs for employee health care, which increase the final costs of goods and services".  This amplifier is still intact, built into large organizations' annual salary plans.  
• The CAS based
  This page reviews the implications of selection, variation and heredity in a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism and its emergence are discussed. 
  
  evolution of the network to include legislated: ACA is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act amended by the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (Obama care).  In part it is designed to make the health care system costs grow slower.  It aims to do this by: increasing competition between insurers and providers, offering free preventative services to limit the development of serious illnesses, constraining patients' use of expensive services, constraining the growth of payments to Medicare providers and piloting new ways for PCPs to manage patient care to keep patients away from costly E.D.s.  It funds these changes with increased taxes on the wealthy.  It follows an architecture developed by Heritage Action's Butler, Moffit, Haislmaier extended by White House OMB health policy advisor Ezekiel Emanuel & architect Jeanne Lambrew.  The Obama administration drafting team included: Bob Kocher; allowing it to integrate ideas from: Dartmouth Institute's Elliot Fischer (ACO).  The ACA did not include a Medicare buy in (May 2016).  The law includes:
  • Alterations, in title I, to how health care is paid for and who is covered.  This has been altered to ensure
    
  • Americans with preexisting conditions get health insurance cover - buttressed by mandating community rating and
    
  • That they are constrained by the individual mandate to have insurance but the requirement was supported by subsidies for the poor (those with incomes between 100 & 400% of the federal poverty line).  
  • Children, allowed to, stay on their parents insurance until 26 years of age. 
    
  • Medicare solvency improvements. 
    
  • Medicaid expansion, in title II: to poor with incomes below 138% of the federal poverty line; an expansion which was subsequently constrained by the Supreme Court's ruling making expansion an optional state government decision. 
    
  • Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) which was enforced by CMS mandated rules finalized in 2011 and effected starting Oct 2012.  
  • Medical home models.  
  • Community transformation grants support the transformation of low income stressed neighborhoods to improve their lifestyles and health. 
    
  • Qualifications for ACOs.  Organizations must:
    
  • Establish a formal legal structure with shared governance which allows the ACO to distribute shared savings payments to participating providers and suppliers. 
    
  • Participate in the MSSP for three or more years. 
    
  • Have a management structure. 
    
  • Have clinical and administrative systems. 
    
  • Include enough PCPs to care for Medicare FFS patient population (> 5000) assigned to the ACO. 
    
  • Be accountable for the quality and cost of care provided to the Medicare FFS patient population. 
    
  • Have defined processes to promote: Evidence-based medicine, Patient-centeredness, Quality reporting, Cost management, Coordination of care; 
  • Demonstrate it meets HHS patient-centeredness criteria including use of patient and caregiver assessments and individualized care plans.  
  • CMMI Medicare payment experimentation.  
  • Requirements that pharmaceutical companies must report payments made to physicians (Sunshine Act). 
    
  • A requirement that chain restaurants must report calorie counts on their menus. 
    
  , MACRA is Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 is designed to encourage physicians to move to FFV and to link Medicare payment to quality & value.  It alters the way Medicare pays for part B physician services encouraging physicians and other ECs to conform to one of two value based payment schemes: Advanced APMs (where the EC can become a QP) or MIPS.  MACRA does not apply to hospitals which have their own meaningful use.  MACRA is designed to promote transformation and includes: Data reporting by ECs, New practice models, Changing clinical standards, and Physician evaluations; with hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties and bonuses.  It authorizes CMS to develop and deploy new rules.  It provides for PCPs in PCMHs to qualify as advanced APMs via a special lower risk pathway.  It replaced the problematic physician SGR formula. 
  ; & regulated: ACO is an Accountable Care Organization. These are accredited bundles of companies which together try to offer Dartmouth-Hitchcock like business models (Dec 2015, Sep 2016) focused on wellness, improving the provision of primary care to a large group of Medicare patients, and rewarding doctors for preventing problems.  Advocate health illustrates the idea.  Robert Pearl notes that the transition is difficult: hospitals that find their efficiency improving should reduce the number of doctors they utilize.  But any doctors that are pushed out of the ACO will likely take their patients with them, undermining the revenues that support the FFV business.  The ACA regulates qualification to be a Medicare ACO.  Individual organizations within a Medicare shared savings ACO continue to submit their own claims and are paid by Medicare for FFS.  But the ACO is eligible for shared savings.  Within the shared savings program the CMS innovation center has setup advanced payment ACOs.  As an alternative to shared savings, in a Pioneer ACO, over time 50% of the FFS payments flow directly to the ACO as a bundled payment.  CMS has established quality measures for ACOs for Medicare.  The CMS program's purpose is to reward providers for reducing total cost of care for patients through prevention, disease management, and coordination. 
  
  • CMS initiated its Physician Group Practice Demonstration in 2005.  By 2008 the congressional budget office reported on Bonus-eligible organizations. 
    
  • CMS defines ACOs as organizations that "create incentives for health care providers to work together to treat an individual patient across care settings - including doctors' offices, hospitals and long-term care facilities."
  • CMS has developed APMs which include ACOs, and advanced APMs where the ACOs must be risk bearing. 
    
  • CMMI accepts providers' proposals to test various payment systems including shared savings and partial capitation.  
  • Private market ACOs have formed including: Providence Health & Services, Blue Shield California, Anthem Blue Cross, United Health Care, BCBS Minnesota, BCBS Illinois, Humana, CIGNA, Main Health Management Coalition, BCBS Massachusetts, Aetna.  
  ;
  Flows of different kinds are essential to the operation of complex adaptive systems (CAS). 
  Example flows are outlined.  Constraints on flows support the emergence of the systems.  Examples of constraints are discussed. 
  
  flows between subscribers, payers and the supply/provision sub-networks supports additional
  This page discusses the benefits of constraining the flows in a complex adaptive system (CAS) until you are ready to act. 
  
  restrictions on flows: PBM is pharmacy benefit manager.  These companies, such as Caremark, were often originally PPMs.  PBMs are used by payers, such as insurance plans, to manage drug provision from pharmacies to the payer's plans subscribers.  PBMs can constrain drug flow to the pharmacies: CVS, Rite-Aid, Walgreens; through the PBM's formularies. 
  , Specialty pharmacy dispense specialty medications.  They aim to save health plans money by: teaching patients how to apply their medicines and deal with side effects, ensure they take the full course and limit waste.  These specialized channels can be used by drug companies to limit competition to their drugs since access in constrained.  Generic drugs rebranded as specialty medications may escape competition, remove copayment and formulary exclusion sales inhibitors and obtain considerable pricing power. 
  ; which can be
  This page discusses the strategy of confusing the control system of a complex adaptive system (CAS). 
  
  un-balanced.  
• Employers are organizing: Health Transformation Alliance; to take advantage of their access to Big Data encompasses the IT systems and processes necessary to do population based data collection, management and analysis.  The very low cost, robust, data storage organized by infrastructure: HADOOP; allows digital data to be stored en mass.  Data scientists then apply assumptions about the world to the data, analogous to evolved mechanisms in vision, in the form of algorithms: Protein folding modeling (Feb 2019) assumes coevolutionary methods can be applied to identify contact points in a protein's tertiary structure.  Rather than depending on averages, analysis at Verisk drills down to specifics and then highlights modeling problems by identifying the underlying CAS.  For the analysis to be useful it requires a hierarchy of supporting BI infrastructure:
  • Analytics utilization and integration delivered via SaaS and the Cloud to cope with the silos and data intensive nature. 
    
  • Analytics tools (BI) for PHM will be hard to develop.  
  • Complex data models must include clinical aspects of the patient specific data, including disease state population wide.  
  • A key aspect is providing clear signals about the nature of the data using data visualization. 
    
  • Data communication with the ability to exchange and transact.  HIEs and EMPI alliance approaches are all struggling to provide effective exchange. 
    
  • Data labeling and secure access and retreival.  While HIPAA was initially drafted as a secure MPI the index was removed from the legislation leaving the US without such a tool.  Silos imply that the security architecture will need to be robust. 
    
  • Raw data scrubbing, restructuring and standardization.  Even financial data is having to be restandarized shifting from ICD-9 to -10.  The intent is to transform the unstructured data via OCR and NLP to structured records to support the analytics process. 
    
  • Raw data warehousing is distributed across silos including PCP, Hospital system and network, cloud and SaaS for process, clinical and financial data. 
    
  • Data collection from the patient's proximate environment as well as provider CPOE, EHRs, workflow and process infrastructure.  The integration of the EHR into a big data collection tool is key. 
    
  about best and worst case health care pricing and quality of their employees treatments, to
  Flows of different kinds are essential to the operation of complex adaptive systems (CAS). 
  Example flows are outlined.  Constraints on flows support the emergence of the systems.  Examples of constraints are discussed. 
  
  flow employees to low cost high quality services (Aug 2017). 
  
• Price constraints, used by government to signal, is an emergent capability which is used by cooperating agents to support coordination & rival agents to support control and dominance.  In eukaryotic cells signalling is used extensively.  A signal interacts with the exposed region of a receptor molecule inducing it to change shape to an activated form.  Chains of enzymes interact with the activated receptor relaying, amplifying and responding to the signal to change the state of the cell.  Many of the signalling pathways pass through the nuclear membrane and interact with the DNA to change its state.  Enzymes sensitive to the changes induced in the DNA then start to operate generating actions including sending further signals.  Cell signalling is reviewed by Helmreich.  Signalling is a fundamental aspect of CAS theory and is discussed from the abstract CAS perspective in signals and sensors.  In AWF the eukaryotic signalling architecture has been abstracted in a codelet based implementation.  To be credible signals must be hard to fake.  To be effective they must be easily detected by the target recipient.  To be efficient they are low cost to produce and destroy. 
  the cost of health care and reduce its use, are removed by:
• Fixed payments for specific treatments independent of cost enable profit seeking and profit maximization by increasing treatment volume. 
  
• Ancillary constraining patient copayments removed (paid) by producers, distributors and operators of treatments, whose profits are tied to list price & treatment volume. 
  
• Drug manufacturer's rebates to intermediaries, off list price, encourage PBM is pharmacy benefit manager.  These companies, such as Caremark, were often originally PPMs.  PBMs are used by payers, such as insurance plans, to manage drug provision from pharmacies to the payer's plans subscribers.  PBMs can constrain drug flow to the pharmacies: CVS, Rite-Aid, Walgreens; through the PBM's formularies. 
  s and insurers to accept high priced prescription drugs onto formularies are lists of drugs that a health plan will cover.  The health plans control where and if the drug is listed in the plan.  A less expensive drug can be assigned a lower copayment to encourage patients to use it.  To counter this attack on their profits drug companies responded with coupons to help patients pay copayments removing the incentive to select the lower-priced drugs.  Health plans reacted to the copayment cards by dropping some drugs from the formulary altogether.  That encourages drug companies to bid for their drug to be the only one listed resulting in some downward price pressure.  .  Government has pushed back. 
  
• Drug price competition legislated: MMA is:
  
  • The Medicare Modernization Act of 2003.  It includes Medicare part D, the Medicare prescription drug benefit, which constrains Medicare from negotiation of its drug prices and created MAC and RAC.  It was sponsored by Senator Bill Tauzin and implemented by Tom Scully.  
  • Mammalian meat allergy which is induced by a month prior tick bite that introduced the allergen alpha-gal.  About 1% of bitten humans develop the allergy & prevalence is increasing.  Humans & old world primates & monkeys don't make alpha-gal (Jul 2018).  Symptoms can include: hives, anaphylactic shock, low blood pressure. 
    
  ; and regulated: Medicare reimbursements, FDA Food and Drug Administration.   trial constraints, Trade agreements; away 
• Patients select services from service providers recommended by their doctors, not the cheapest or highest quality (Jul 2018). 
  

• Critical variables include: tax policy, reduced dependency of US elites on the people, education cost & access, smoking (life expectancy is a measure of the average life time of a new born baby.  Without public health assistance many children die in the first five years of life significantly lowering the life expectancy of the whole group.  There are representational and data capture problems with the model:
  
  • Not knowing the risk of dying in the newborn's future, demographers use the risks present at that time to predict impacts in the future of the person.  No adjustment can be made for increased wellbeing. 
    
  • Saving the lives of children has a far larger effect on increasing life expectancy than extending the lives of the elderly
    
  • Impacts that occur in a particular year, such as a epidemic or pandemic, are treated as permanent effects for that years life expectancy even though they may be handled by public health strategies and hence be transients.  For life expectancy calculations in subsequent years the impact is ignored.  
  • Programs that reduced the impacts of infectious diseases, such as antibiotics and vaccine deployment, have reduced the variability of life expectancy following their introduction.  
  • Vital registration systems gather accurate data for life expectancy.  But most countries do not have the infrastructure and instead estimates are generated from demographic and health surveys. 
    
  ), sitting, smartphone rewards, alcohol & fast-food is defined by Nhanes as any item obtained from a fast-food/pizza establishment.  Gordon discusses the development of fast-food restaurants in the US.  Michael Pollan compares the industrial processed food supply chain with organic and hunter gatherer equivalents. 
  consumption, parasitic & structural prioritization of health care over public health and infrastructure, mass production transactional health care architecture, strategic avoidance of profit control affecting: hospital pricing, drug pricing, technology deployment arms race, private company dominance; unstable hierarchy and yearly health insurance contracts. 
  
• Indicator variables include: height, financial situation, chronic alcoholism, drug addiction, exercise addiction (joint collapse), smartphone app addiction, education level, obesity is a disorder where the brain is induced to require more eating, often because of limits to the number of fat cells available to report satiation (Jul 2016).  It is associated with: metabolic syndrome including inflammation, cancer (Aug 2016), high cholesterol, hypertension, type-2-diabetes, asthma and heart disease.  It is suspected that this is contributing to the increase in maternal deaths in the US (Sep 2016).  Obesity is a complex condition best viewed as representing many different diseases, which is affected by the: Amount of brown adipose tissue (Oct 2016), Asprosin signalling by white adipose tissue (Nov 2016), Genetic alleles including 25 which guarantee an obese outcome, side effects of some pharmaceuticals for: Psychiatric disorders, Diabetes, Seizure, Hypertension, Auto-immunity; Acute diseases: Hypothyroidism, Cushing's syndrome, Hypothalamus disorders; State of the gut microbiome.  Infections, but not antibiotics, appear associated with childhood obesity (Nov 2016). 
  , reduced sleep, opaque hospital pricing & drug pricing, chronic stress is a multi-faceted condition reflecting high cortisol levels.  Dr. Robert Sapolsky's studies of baboons indicate that stress helps build readiness for fight or flight.  As these actions occur the levels of cortisol return to the baseline rate.  A stressor is anything that disrupts the regular homeostatic balance.  The stress response is the array of neural and endocrine changes that occur to respond effectively to the crisis and reestablish homeostasis. 
  
  • The short term response to the stressor
    
  • activates the amygdala which: Stimulates the brain stem resulting in inhibition of the parasympathetic nervous system and activation of the sympathetic nervous system with the hormones epinephrine and norepinephrine deployed around the body, Activates the PVN which generates a cascade resulting in glucocorticoid secretion to: get energy to the muscles with increased blood pressure for a powerful response.  The brain's acuity and cognition are stimulated.  The immune system is stimulated with beta-endorphin and repair activities curtail.  But when the stressor is
    
  • long term: loneliness, debt; and no action is necessary, or possible, long term damage ensues.  Damage from such stress may only occur in specific situations: Nuclear families coping with parents moving in.  Sustained stress provides an evolved amplifier of a position of dominance and status.  It is a strategy in female aggression used to limit reproductive competition.  Sustained stress:
    
  • Stops the frontal cortex from ensuring we do the harder thing, instead substituting amplification of the individual's propensity for risk-taking and impairing risk assessment! 
    
  • Activates the integration between the thalamus and amygdala. 
    
  • Acts differently on the amygdala in comparison to the frontal cortex and hippocampus: Stress strengthens the integration between the Amygdala and the hippocampus, making the hippocampus fearful. 
    
  • BLA & BNST respond with increased BDNF levels and expanded dendrites persistently increasing anxiety and fear conditioning. 
    
  • Makes it easier to learn a fear association and to consolidate it into long-term memory.  Sustained stress makes it harder to unlearn fear by making the prefrontal cortex inhibit the BLA from learning to break the fear association and weakening the prefrontal cortex's hold over the amygdala.  And glucocorticoids decrease activation of the medial prefrontal cortex during processing of emotional faces.  Accuracy of assessing emotions from faces suffers.  A terrified rat generating lots of glucocorticoids will cause dendrites in the hippocampus to atrophy but when it generates the same amount from excitement of running on a wheel the dendrites expand.  The activation of the amygdala seems to determine how the hippocampus responds. 
    
  • Depletes the nucleus accumbens of dopamine biasing rats toward social subordination and biasing humans toward depression. 
    
  • Disrupts working memory by amplifying norepinephrine signalling in the prefrontal cortex and amygdala to prefrontal cortex signalling until they become destructive.  It also desynchronizes activation in different frontal lobe regions impacting shifting of attention.  
  • Increases the risk of autoimmune disease (Jan 2017) 
  • During depression, stress inhibits dopamine signalling.  
  • Strategies for stress reduction include: Mindfulness. 
    
  . 
  
• Buffered -ve feedback: VDS is value delivery system.   for processed foods, Economic growth; broadly
  Deaton describes the wellbeing of people around the world today.  He explains the powerful benefit of public health strategies and the effect of growth in material wellbeing but also the corrosive effects of aid. 
  
  Following our summary of Deaton's arguments RSS comments from the perspective of complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  The situation he describes is complex including powerful amplifiers, alignment and incentives that overlap broadly with other RSS summaries of adaptations of: The biosphere, Politics, Economics, Philosophy and Health care. 
  
  
  reduce poverty, masking accumulating negative effects. 
  
• If one compares America to the human body, the public health is the proactive planning, coordination and execution of strategies to improve and safeguard the wellbeing of the public.  Its global situation is discussed in The Great Escape by Deaton.  Public health in the US is coordinated by the PHS federally but is mainly executed at the state and local levels.  Public health includes:
  • Awareness campaigns about health threatening activities including: Smoking, Over-eating, Alcohol consumption, Contamination with poisons: lead; Joint damage from over-exercise;
    
  • Research, monitoring and control of disease agents, processes and vectors by agencies including the CDC. 
    
  • Monitoring of the public's health by institutes including the NIH.  This includes screening for cancer & heart disease. 
    
  • Development, deployment and maintenance of infrastructure including: sewers, water plants and pipes.  
  • Development, deployment and maintenance of vaccination strategies.  
  • Development, deployment and maintenance of fluoridation. 
    
  • Development, deployment and maintenance of family planning services. 
    
  • Regulation and constraint of foods, drugs and devices by agencies including the FDA.  
  system, health care network and the
  Matt Taibbi describes the phenotypic alignment of the American justice system.  The result he explains relentlessly grinds the poor and undocumented into resources to be constrained, consumed and ejected.  Even as it supports and aligns the financial infrastructure into a potent weapon capable of targeting any company or nation to extract profits and leave the victim deflated. 
  
  Taibbi uses five scenarios to provide a broad picture of the: activities, crimes, policing, prosecutions, court processes, prisons and deportation network.  The scenarios are: Undocumented people's neighborhoods, Poor neighborhoods, Welfare recipients, Credit card debtors and Financial institutions.
  
  Following our summary of his arguments, RSS comments on them framed by complex adaptive system (CAS) theory.  The alignment of the justice system reflects a set of long term strategies and responses to a powerful global arms race that the US leadership intends to win. 
  
  
  justice system together seem analogous to our extensive immune system has to support and protect an inventory of host cell types, detect and respond to invaders and maintain the symbiont equilibrium within the microbiome.  It detects microbes which have breached the secreted mucus barrier, driving them back and fortifying the barrier.  It culls species within the microbiome that are expanding beyond requirements.  It destroys invaders who make it into the internal transport networks.  As part of its initialization it has immune cells which suppress the main system to allow the microbiome to bootstrap.  The initial microbiome is tailored by the antibodies supplied from the mother's milk while breastfeeding.  The immune system consists of two main parts the older non-adaptive part and the newer adaptive part.  The adaptive part achieves this property by being schematically specified by DNA which is highly variable.  By rapid reproduction the system recombines the DNA variable regions in vast numbers of offspring cells which once they have been shown not to attack the host cell lines are used as templates for interacting with any foreign body (antigen).  When the immune cell's DNA hyper-variable regions are expressed as y-shaped antibody proteins they typically include some receptor like structures which match the surfaces of the typical antigen.  Once the antibody becomes bound to the antigen the immune system cells can destroy the invader. 
  .  Just as a deficient or over active immune system is dangerous to the complete body's health the same is true of the health care network's impacts on the nation. 

• Developing communities leverage the presence of a nearby hospital (positive feedback
  This page reviews the catalytic impact of infrastructure on the expression of phenotypic effects by an agent.  The infrastructure reduces the cost the agent must pay to perform the selected action.  The catalysis is enhanced by positive returns. 
  
  infrastructure amplifier) which can be in conflict with the demographic and economic shift away from various regions in America: rural (negative feedback
  Flows of different kinds are essential to the operation of complex adaptive systems (CAS). 
  Example flows are outlined.  Constraints on flows support the emergence of the systems.  Examples of constraints are discussed. 
  
  flow); which help the
  This page reviews Christensen's disruption of a complex adaptive system (CAS).  The mechanism is discussed with examples from biology and business. 
  
  disruption of the current network of hospitals in these regions.  
• Monopoly is a power relation within:
  
  • A state in which a group has enough power to enforce its will on other citizens.  If this is a central authority with a cohesive military, it can overpower other warlords and stabilize the society. 
    
  • An economy in which one business has enough share in a market segment to control margins to its advantage.  An economic monopoly can be broadly beneficial: AT&T monopoly, US patent monopoly rights;
    
  induced wealth is schematically useful information and its equivalent, schematically useful energy, to paraphrase Beinhocker.  It is useful because an agent has schematic strategies that can utilize the information or energy to extend or leverage control of the cognitive niche.    allows investment in
  This page looks at schematic structures and their uses.  It discusses a number of examples:
  

  • Schematic ideas are recombined in creativity. 
  • Similarly designers take ideas and rules about materials and components and combine them. 
  • Schematic Recipes help to standardize operations. 
  • Modular components are combined into strategies for use in business plans and business models. 

  
  As a working example it presents part of the contents and schematic details from the Adaptive Web Framework (AWF)'s operational plan. 
  
  Finally it includes a section presenting our formal representation of schematic goals. 
  Each goal has a series of associated complex adaptive system (CAS) strategy strings. 
  These goals plus strings are detailed for various chess and business examples. 
  
  strategy and innovation is the economic realization of invention and combinatorial exaptation.  While highly innovative, monopolies: AT&T, IBM; usually have limited economic reach, constraining productivity.  This explains the use of regulation, or even its threat, that can check their power and drive the creations across the economy. 
  , but limits availability and leverage of the creations, undermining productivity is the efficiency with which an agent's selected strategy converts the inputs to an action into the resulting outputs.  It is a complex capability of agents.  It will depend on the agent having: time, motivation, focus, appropriate skills; the coherence of the participating collaborators, and a beneficial environment including the contribution of: standardization of inputs and outputs, infrastructure and evolutionary amplifiers. 
  .  

US health care insurance plan transaction

US health care access transaction

US health care treatment transaction

1. The patient is an
   This page discusses the mechanisms and effects of emergence underpinning any complex adaptive system (CAS).  Key research is reviewed. 
   
   emergent
   This page introduces the complex adaptive system (CAS) theory frame.  The theory is positioned relative to the natural sciences.  It catalogs the laws and strategies which underpin the operation of systems that are based on the interaction of emergent agents. 
   John Holland's framework for representing complexity is outlined.  Links to other key aspects of CAS theory discussed at the site are presented. 
   
   system.  The patient includes the microbiome, the trillions of bacteria and viruses that live inside higher animals' guts, on their skin etc.  These bacteria and viruses seem to play a role in: immune responses, digesting food, making nutrients, controlling mental health and maintaining a healthy weight.  The signals from the gut microbiota are relayed by major nerve fibers: vagus; to the central nervous system.  The symbiotic relationship must be actively managed.  Human armpits include glands which provide food favoring certain symbionts who build a defensive shield above the skin.  In the human gut: Barriers are setup: Mucus secretions form a physical constraint and provide sites for bacteriophages to anchor and attack pathogenic bacteria; Symbiont tailored nourishment: Plant-heavy food creates opportunities for fibre specialists like Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron; is provided, Selective binding sites are provided, Poisons are deployed against the unwelcome, and Temperature, acidity and oxygenation are managed.    High throughput sequencing allows the characterization of bacterial populations inside guts.  Beginning at birth, as they pass down the birth canal infants are supplied with a microbiome from their mothers.  If they are borne via cesarean they never receive some of the key bacteria: Bifidobaterium infantis which is also dependent on oligosaccharides in breast milk; from their mothers.  A variety of diseases may be caused by changes in the microbiome:
   • Eczema can be related to changes in the skin microbiome. 
     
   • Obesity can be induced by changes to the gut microbiome.  
   • Chronic inflammation
     
   • Allergies
     
   • Type 1 diabetes
     
   setup in a symbiotic is a long term situation between two, or more, different agents where the resources of both are shared for mutual benefit.  Some of the relationships have built remarkable dependencies: Tremblaya's partnership with citrus mealybugs and bacterial DNA residing in the mealybug's genome, Aphids with species of secondary symbiont bacteria deployed sexually from a male aphid sperm reservoir and propagated asexually by female aphids only while their local diet induces a dependency.  If the power relations and opportunities change for the participants then they will adapt and the situation may transform into separation, predation or parasitism. 
   relationship during development is a phase during the operation of a CAS agent.  It allows for schematic strategies to be iteratively blended with environmental signals to solve the logistical issues of migrating newly built and transformed sub-agents.  That is needed to achieve the adult configuration of the agent and optimize it for the proximate environment.  Smiley includes examples of the developmental phase agents required in an emergent CAS.  In situations where parents invest in the growth and memetic learning of their offspring the schematic grab bag can support optimizations to develop models, structures and actions to construct an adept adult.  In humans, adolescence leverages neural plasticity, elder sibling advice and adult coaching to help prepare the deploying neuronal network and body to successfully compete. 
   . 
   
2. The disease could be an invasive pathogen, also an emergent system, or a problem with the operation of cellular agents that on aggregate make up the patient. 
   
3. The treatment of a bacterial pathogen may be an evolved bactericide such as penicillin.  Such a treatment can result in destruction of the pathogen with few apparent side effects for the patient.  But
   
• The microbiome is likely to be significantly impacted.  That may transform the relationship between the participants in
  This page introduces the complex adaptive system (CAS) theory frame.  The theory is positioned relative to the natural sciences.  It catalogs the laws and strategies which underpin the operation of systems that are based on the interaction of emergent agents. 
  John Holland's framework for representing complexity is outlined.  Links to other key aspects of CAS theory discussed at the site are presented. 
  
  complex adaptive ways.  Due to the dependence on effective symbiosis to maintain the integrity of the
  Barriers are particular types of constraints on flows.  They can enforce separation of a network of agents allowing evolution to build diversity.  Examples of different types of barriers: physical barriers, chemical molecules can form membranes, probability based, cell membranes can include controllable channels, eukaryotes leverage membranes, symbiosis, human emotions, chess, business; and their effects are described. 
  
  barriers to the eukaryotic, a relatively large multi-component cell type from which yeast and multi-celled plants and animals, including humans, is constructed.  It contains modules including a nucleus and production functions such as mitochondria. 
  
  This page reviews the catalytic impact of infrastructure on the expression of phenotypic effects by an agent.  The infrastructure reduces the cost the agent must pay to perform the selected action.  The catalysis is enhanced by positive returns. 
  
  infrastructure even penicillin's long term effects are complex.  Surgery with its dependence on antibiotic are compounds which kill bacteria, molds, etc.  Sulfur dye stuffs were found to be effective antibiotics.  The first evolved antibiotic discovered was penicillin.  Antibiotics are central to modern health care supporting the processes of: Surgery, Wound management, Infection control; which makes the development of antibiotic resistance worrying.  Antibiotics are:
  • Economically problematic to develop and sell. 
    
  • Congress enacted GAIN to encourage development of new antibiotics.  But it has not developed any market-entry award scheme, which seems necessary to encourage new antibiotic R&D. 
    
  • Medicare has required hospitals and SNFs to execute plans to ensure correct use of antibiotics & prevent the spread of drug-resistant infections.  
  • C.D.C. is acting to stop the spread of resistant infections and reduce unnecessary use of antibiotics.  
    
  • F.D.A. has simplified approval standards.  It is working with industry to limit use of antibiotics in livestock. 
    
  • BARDA is promoting public-private partnerships to support promising research.
    
  • Impacting the microbiome of the recipient.  Stool banking is a solution  (Sloan-Kettering stool banking).  
  • Associated with obesity, although evidence suggests childhood obesity relates to the infections not the antibiotic treatments (Nov 2016). 
    
  • Monitored globally by W.H.O.
    
  • Regulated in the US by the F.D.A. who promote voluntary labeling by industry to discourage livestock fattening (Dec 2013).  
  • Customer demands have more effect - Perdue shifts to no antibiotics in premier chickens (Aug 2015). 
    
  driven sterile procedure aims to destroy the skin microbiome and massively perturb the gut microbiome. 
  
• That does not necessarily imply that the mode of action is understood.  The treatment of a well understood metabolic problem such as type I diabetes, with the hormone are signalling molecules: ACTH, TRH, Melanocyte stimulating hormone, Testosterone, Oxytocin, Vasopressin, Insulin, Growth hormone, Estrogen, Progesterone, Angiotensin II, Asprosin, EPO, Irisin, Leptin, FGF21 hormone, Prostaglandins, TSH, Thyroxine, Glococorticoids; that are transported by the circulatory system to interact with target organs having appropriate receptors.  The levels of hormones can fluctuate massively, as in pregnancy. 
  insulin regulates the metabolism of carbohydrates, fats and protein by signalling the absorption of glucose by fat, liver and skeletal muscle cells.  It is a peptide hormone generated in the islets of Langerhans beta cells of the pancreas.  Peter Medawar explains it was an early drug therapy success.  As manufacturers have shifted from products developed by extraction to biologics: Humulin, Lantus, Levemir; safety has improved.  But the US list price has risen steeply (Feb 2016, Jan 2017)
  also depends for its efficacy on the evolved operation of the patient's cellular signalling systems, is an emergent capability which is used by cooperating agents to support coordination & rival agents to support control and dominance.  In eukaryotic cells signalling is used extensively.  A signal interacts with the exposed region of a receptor molecule inducing it to change shape to an activated form.  Chains of enzymes interact with the activated receptor relaying, amplifying and responding to the signal to change the state of the cell.  Many of the signalling pathways pass through the nuclear membrane and interact with the DNA to change its state.  Enzymes sensitive to the changes induced in the DNA then start to operate generating actions including sending further signals.  Cell signalling is reviewed by Helmreich.  Signalling is a fundamental aspect of CAS theory and is discussed from the abstract CAS perspective in signals and sensors.  In AWF the eukaryotic signalling architecture has been abstracted in a codelet based implementation.  To be credible signals must be hard to fake.  To be effective they must be easily detected by the target recipient.  To be efficient they are low cost to produce and destroy. 
  . 
  
4. The doctor may be an independent agent working with support and infrastructure from a
   
5. Health care provider, part of the health care system.  Surgery, with its dependence on antibiotic are compounds which kill bacteria, molds, etc.  Sulfur dye stuffs were found to be effective antibiotics.  The first evolved antibiotic discovered was penicillin.  Antibiotics are central to modern health care supporting the processes of: Surgery, Wound management, Infection control; which makes the development of antibiotic resistance worrying.  Antibiotics are:
   • Economically problematic to develop and sell. 
     
   • Congress enacted GAIN to encourage development of new antibiotics.  But it has not developed any market-entry award scheme, which seems necessary to encourage new antibiotic R&D. 
     
   • Medicare has required hospitals and SNFs to execute plans to ensure correct use of antibiotics & prevent the spread of drug-resistant infections.  
   • C.D.C. is acting to stop the spread of resistant infections and reduce unnecessary use of antibiotics.  
     
   • F.D.A. has simplified approval standards.  It is working with industry to limit use of antibiotics in livestock. 
     
   • BARDA is promoting public-private partnerships to support promising research.
     
   • Impacting the microbiome of the recipient.  Stool banking is a solution  (Sloan-Kettering stool banking).  
   • Associated with obesity, although evidence suggests childhood obesity relates to the infections not the antibiotic treatments (Nov 2016). 
     
   • Monitored globally by W.H.O.
     
   • Regulated in the US by the F.D.A. who promote voluntary labeling by industry to discourage livestock fattening (Dec 2013).  
   • Customer demands have more effect - Perdue shifts to no antibiotics in premier chickens (Aug 2015). 
     
   sterile procedure and opioid based pain management is an iterative process, overseen by a doctor, to limit a patient's pain.  The process is doctor prescribed, RN managed, pharmacist validated, and patient administered.  The process may be coordinated by pain management specialists.  Pain management is central to modern surgery where it is supported by hospital infrastructure.  It is central to the perioperative process.  It is a major aspect of ED operations.  It has been extended out to discharged patients with chronic long term pain where it can lead to opioid dependency.  Treatments include: Opioids including: Fentanyl, Morphine, OxyContin, Percocet; NSAIDs, Cannabinoids, Acupuncture, Massage, CBT, and Mindfulness.  , has broad side effects which are slowly being characterized.  The doctor hands over the caring aspects of the treatment transaction to nurses and other hospital staff.  In effect the hospital completes large numbers of parallel discrete transactions, each one specified by the physician. 
   Glenn Steele & David Feinberg review the development of the modern Geisinger healthcare business after its near collapse following the abandoned merger with Penn State AMC.  After an overview of the business, they describe how a calamity unfolding around them supported building a vision of a better US health care network.  And they explain:
   

   • How they planned out the transformation,
     
   • Leveraging an effective governance structure,
     
   • Using a strategy to gain buy in,
     
   • Enabling reengineering at the clinician patient interface. 
   • Implementing the reengineering for acute, chronic & hot spot care; to help the patients and help the physicians.  
   • Geisinger's leverage of biologics.  
   • Reengineering healing with ProvenExperience.  
   • Where Geisinger is headed next. 
     

   
   Following our summary of their arguments RSS comments on them.  We frame their ideas with complex adaptive system (CAS) theory. 
   
   
   Geisinger & Kaiser have rebelled against this custom transactional strategy. 
   
6. Government administrators and regulators attempt to
   The agents in complex adaptive systems (CAS) must model their environment to respond effectively to it.  Samuel modeling is described as an approach. 
   
   model, influence and constrain the health care system to conform to the current rules and parameters specified by the US is the United States of America.   and state legislatures.  As such businesses, seeking profits, and participating directly and indirectly in the health care system adapt and seek attractive niches.  Parasitic behaviors is a long term relationship between the parasite and its host where the resources of the host are utilized by the parasite without reciprocity.  Often parasites include schematic adaptations allowing the parasite to use the hosts modeling and control systems to divert resources to them or improve their chance of reproduction: Toxoplasma gondii.   emerge from the availability of model and control structures that can be influenced. 

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