Topic

Healthier Together: Collaborative Networks of Patients, Clinicians, and Researchers Creating Learning Health Systems

Presenters

Peter Margolis, MD, PhD, Co-Director, Anderson Center for Health Systems Excellence, Cincinnati Children’s Research Foundation, and Professor of Pediatrics, Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center

Carole Lannon, MD, MPH, Senior Faculty Lead, Learning Networks Program, Anderson Center for Health Systems Excellence, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center; Professor of Pediatrics, University of Cincinnati; and Senior Quality Advisor, American Board of Pediatrics

Keywords

Learning health systems; Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center; ImproveCareNow, Knowledge commons; Quality improvement; Stakeholder engagement

Key Points

• A learning health system integrates healthcare delivery, quality improvement, and research together in a single system. The collective intelligence of patients and clinicians, caregivers and researchers is harnessed in a learning health system to provide better outcomes. Such an endeavor focuses on patient outcomes, builds community, and uses technology effectively.
• An online “knowledge commons” is a place where data are accumulated and resources are shared among the community of participants. One example is the network ImproveCareNow, a collaboration of patients, parents, clinicians, and researchers focused on improving outcomes for children with Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, and irritable bowel disease.

Discussion Themes

Highly engaged participants, or lead users, are innovative and can often anticipate the needs of the rest of the community.

Health plans (payers) also have a valuable role in a learning health system both from a longitudinal data perspective across health systems as well as an interest in the provision of high-quality evidence-based care. How have you engaged local and national health plans?

How do you harmonize data across healthcare systems, which may have different data systems?

How do you address HIPAA concerns to allow ready sharing of data into a common data repository?

For More Information

Read more about how @ImproveCareNow is creating a #LearningHealthSystem at http://www.improvecarenow.org/.
The National Academy of Medicine (formerly IOM) has a series on Learning Health Systems.

Tags
#LearningHealthSystem, #pctGR
@ImproveCareNow, @PCTGrandRounds, @Collaboratory1, @PCORnetwork