Maintenance of human capital by the healthcare system: Societal and political impacts of healthcare system integration

Human capital is the collection of durable attributes of individuals in a society that enable the production and consumption of goods and services. These attributes include the knowledge, skills, and abilities of individuals (which facilitates production) and their beliefs, desires, and intentions (which facilitates consumption). The healthcare system in a society maintains human capital by preserving the capacity to produce and consume. Systems engineering of complex socio-technical systems such as integrated health care systems needs tools and methods to represent the salient system dynamics and system performance measures. A notional model of human capital has been developed at the Georgia Tech Research Institute, and we are developing computational representations of the components of that model. The key attributes of human capital are the subjective well-being and the standard of living of individuals. Healthcare system performance is represented by reductions in disability adjusted life years, and in lost work days, and overall effectiveness is represented by the impact on subjective well being and standard of living across the population. Political impacts go beyond the politics of healthcare costs, and include capability to respond to emergencies and to address chronic population stressors.