how to facilitate social contagion?

achieving the millennium development goals has proven to be a real challenge. providing evidence on cost-effective interventions did not prove to be sufficient to secure the trust of national authorities, health care providers and patients. introducing change in a health system requires a good understanding of the relationships between the actors of the system. social network analysis can provide a new avenue to analyse the diffusion of innovations within a health system or a health organisation and analyse the structure and the properties of a health system. evidence has been generated on the necessity of not only identifying the actors of a system but also qualifying the relationships between these actors.