Donald Ruggiero Lo Sardo, PhD at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna, will present the joint work of Donald Ruggiero Lo Sardo, Vito D. P. Servedio, Johannes Sorger, Stefan Thurner and Peter Klimek at the yearly meeting of the Complex Systems Society, which this year takes place in Thessaloniki, Greece, from September 23–28.
Vellidio Convention Center, Room 7
“Systemic Risk in Health-Care Networks”
Track: Biological and (Bio)Medical Complexity
Abstract:
Health-care systems can be represented as complex, multi-layered networks. Demographic shifts, like population aging and urbanization, together with increasing financial pressures exert an ever-growing amount of stress on the system. These tendencies often result in a reduction of the density of primary care providers in specific regions. How much can the stress increase before the health-care system loses its ability to deliver adequate care to the population? How does one measure the systemic risk in health care?
Here, for the first time, we show how recent methodological advances in our capacity to anticipate system-wide failures of financial systems, resulting from localized events, can be used to quantify the systemic risk in health care. We have used a comprehensive, large-scale, and nation-wide dataset of the Austrian health-care system to model it in terms of patient-sharing networks, where nodes represent health-care providers and links indicate flows of patients between them. The removal of a provider in this network causes a cascading process of referrals between providers, as patients have to locate an alternative doctor. We observe that typically the removal of a few providers does not have a major impact but there is a regime where removals trigger system-spanning cascades and patients are not cared for anymore. We see that regions are particularly susceptible to cascading impacts if the topology of their underlying patient-sharing network shows low betweenness centrality. This suggests that the network topology has a strong effect on the resilience of the system. Namely there is a “strength of weak ties” effect, whereby high betweenness centrality is important in order to spread the shock. We discuss the implications of these results for efficient design and management of health-care networks.