The Physics of Health Care: Viewing the U.S. Health‐Care “System” from the Perspective of Quantum Mechanics

Abstract

AbstractLeading explanations for high per capita and total health‐care spending in the United States tend to point to high health‐care prices as the primary culprit, which are a major contributor. Yet prices and spending do not exist in siloed vacuums. They are inherently part of, and deeply intertwined with, patient and clinician interactions, administrative norms and requirements, organizational structures, and socio‐cultural systems of medicine. Consequently, what is often thought of as a bounded health‐care “system”—centered primarily around the volume and price of health care—may, in fact, be unbounded, spilling over and interacting with other seemingly unrelated domains. Adding to the scholarly work already addressing this issue, we aim to provide a new lens that captures (if only partially) the exquisitely complex and hidden equilibrium present in what constitutes U.S. health care. Quantum and relativistic physics, with its focus on non‐deterministic reasoning, can serve as a helpful framework for understanding the moving parts of health care—their interposition as well as their interdependence. Using this analytic lens could potentially lead to new interventions (involving clinicians, patients, and payers) that concurrently target problems at multiple points in the system.