Our Systems Approach

Health and public health are complex systems.

Health and public health are complex systems with many interconnected parts and relationships, including one's biology and genetics, culture, social networks, environment, and economics. Communities, cities and countries are increasingly interconnected via businesses, transportation, media and the internet. Any factor, change, policy or intervention within one portion of society can have reverberations within a community, city, state, region, country, or even world-wide.

The dangers of not using a systems approach

Making a decision that involves such complex systems is challenging since seeing the secondary, tertiary, and other indirect effects of a change can be difficult. If you don’t fully understand the systems that affect and are affected by health, it can be hard to establish policies, interventions, products, and guidance that work for different people and circumstances. In fact, not using a systems approach can even result in unintended consequences, worsening existing disparities, Band-Aids rather than solutions, expended time, effort and other resources from trial and error, missing second and tertiary effects, and introducing bias.

  • Band-Aids rather than solutions

  • Missing secondary and tertiary effects

  • Unintended consequences

  • Worsening existing disparities

  • Expended time, effort, and resources from trial and error

  • Introducing bias

Systems approaches have transformed other fields

Meteorology, transportation, and air traffic control are just a few fields that were transformed with the advent of systems approaches like computer modeling. Before computer models generated the weather predictions that we have available today, it was difficult to see how wind, barometric pressure, cloud formations, temperatures, and precipitation all fit together to form weather patterns. Now we have the Doppler radar and weather predictions at our fingertips due to systems approaches like computer modeling. These transformations didn’t result from siloed approaches but instead resulted from efforts to incorporate all the complex factors that make up the entire system.

PHICOR’s Systems Approach

Our PHICOR (Public Health Informatics, Computational, and Operations Research) team is based at the City University of New York Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy (CUNY SPH). For over two decades, PHICOR has been developing systems, artificial intelligence (AI), and other computational approaches, methods, models, and tools to help decision makers better understand and address complex systems in health.

This approach allows PHICOR to:

Break down complex systems into simplistic forms

Save time, money, and other resources that are associated with traditional problem-solving methods 

Strip away the noise and make complex systems easier to understand and tackle

Computer simulation modeling and AI

PHICOR’s computer simulation models and AI serve as virtual laboratories to better understand and explore the impact of a policy, product, or intervention all within the safety of a computer before making any decisions. They allow for virtual testing of different circumstances, interventions, and policies that may not be possible or practical or ethical in real-life.

  • AIMINGS

    Awarded by the NIH in early 2022, AIMINGS serves as the AI Center for the NIH Nutrition for Precision Health (NPH) Consortium. AIMINGS is the world’s first AI and computer modeling Center for precision nutrition and health. Precision nutrition is an emerging area aimed at better tailoring diets to different people’s characteristics and circumstances to achieve better health outcomes.

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  • VPOP

    (Virtual Populations for Obesity Prevention) is a software platform that has involved developing various suites of multiscale computer models of communities, cities, and regions that allow decision makers and stakeholders (e.g., policymakers, funders, public health officials, school officials, and business professionals) to design and test various obesity prevention measures, policies, and interventions with the safety of a computer before trying in real life. This project has been funded by the NIH, Aspen Institute, Laureus Sport for Good Foundation, and Nike. To date, PHICOR has developed VPOP computer models of Baltimore City, Mexico City, New Orleans, New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Washington D.C.

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  • RHEA

    (Regional Healthcare Ecosystem Analyst) is a software platform that can generate a computer model of the healthcare facilities and communities in a region. RHEA can serve as a “virtual laboratory” to help identify vulnerabilities and test different policies and interventions for a healthcare system. This project has been funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and CDC.

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