Journal of evaluation in clinical practice
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Data about health care organizations (HCOs) are not useful until they are interpreted. Such interpretations are influenced by the theoretical lenses used by the researcher. ⋯ We suggest that the task of interpreting research observations of HCOs could be improved if researchers take into account that the systems they study are CASs with non-linear relationships among diverse, learning agents. Our analysis points out how interpretation of research results might be shaped by the fact that HCOs are CASs. We described how learning is, in fact, the result of interactions among diverse agents and that learning can, by itself, reduce or increase agent diversity. We encouraged researchers to be persistent in their attempts to reason about complex systems and learn to attend not only to structures, but also to processes and functions of complex systems.