Tools for tomorrow's health care system: a systems-informed mental model, moral imagination, and physicians' professionalism.

Physician educators have been charged with incorporating systems-based approaches into medical education and residency training to help future physicians understand how their ability to provide high-quality health care depends on other individual and organizational stakeholders with whom and, in some cases, for whom they work. In part, this also requires that physicians accept that they have responsibilities to various system stakeholders. These changes are controversial because some fear they might distract physicians from their primary ethical obligation to their patients. However, systems theories and their applications in organizational management and business ethics support the notions that individuals can maintain primary professional ethical obligations while working within complex systems and that organizational systems can be constructed to support individual professional practice. If physicians are to commit to working within and, ultimately, improving systems of care as part of their ethical practice of medicine, then they will need a new mental model. Leading thinkers have used various models of systems and have highlighted different aspects of systems theories in describing organizations, groups of organizations, and organizational processes. This essay draws from these models some basic concepts and elements and introduces a simple but comprehensive mental model of systems for physicians. If it is used with professionalism and moral imagination, physicians might have a tool that they can use to understand, work with, and, ultimately, improve the systems of care that they rely on in their practice of medicine and that critically affect the welfare of their patients.