As any living complex adaptive system, the microsystem
must: (1) do the work, (2) meet member needs and (3)
maintain itself as a functioning clinical unit. As we continue to
move beyond conceptual theory and research to application in
clinical settings, the emerging fields of chaos theory, complexity
science, complex adaptive systems and lean production have
influenced how these concepts have been applied to improving
microsystems.10–13 This is evident in the work to bring together
microsystems from around the world to learn and share best
practices (updates on these efforts are available at http://
clinicalmicrosystem.org14).