Three senior LDI fellows and Penn Medicine researchers—Megan Lane-Fall, Jaya Isola, and Jennifer Myers—received a $3.8 million grant to create a national coordinating center for a new network of training and research scientists embedded in the health system (LHS E – STaR) Centers funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI).
Opened in January this year, 16 LHS E-STaR centers across the country will train scientists to work directly in health systems to conduct research that can be quickly applied domestically to improve health outcomes and clinical services. The first five years of the national program are funded at $80 million.
In announcing the launch, AHRQ Director Robert Otto Valdez and PCOR Executive Director Nakela L. Cook said, “AHRQ and PCORI are committed to developing the infrastructure and training necessary for learning health systems to conduct patient-focused comparative clinical effectiveness research (CER). that generates evidence that meets the needs of patients and clinicians at the point of care… The initiative will provide training and professional development for scientists across health care delivery settings, engage communities and other health system stakeholders in new ways, and promote research to improve health outcomes. at the individual and population levels, while improving health system performance.”
Internal health system research
The concept of learning health systems (LHS) emerged from the 2001 publication of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) report, “Crossing the Quality Chasm.” The LHS philosophy was developed to address the health care deficiencies described in this report, one of the most important of which was the slow diffusion of the latest evidence-based practices. At LHS sites, clinical data and patient outcomes are used as feedback by researchers to inform changes and further research, allowing rapid learning and adaptation of the system.
New LHS E-STaR programs will train clinical scientists to become investigators at their own institutions and conduct internal reviews of ongoing clinical and logistics operations.
Pennsylvania’s new national coordination center will be called the SCALE-LHS Hub, which stands for Synthesize, Coordinate, Expand, Study, and Evaluate the AHRQ/PCORI LHS Network.
Oversight of the SCALE-LHS Center as several Principal Investigators Lane-Fall, MD, MSHPLDI Senior Scientist, Professor and Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Implementation Science Center (PISCE); Aisola, MD, DTMHLDI Senior Fellow, Associate Professor and Executive Director of the Penn Medicine Center for Advancing Health Equity (CHEA); And Myers, MDLDI Senior Fellow, Professor and Director of the Pennsylvania Center for Healthcare Improvement and Patient Safety (CHIPS). The Perelman School of Medicine’s PISCE, CHEA, and CHIPS centers will collaborate in the Penn SCALE-LHS Center.
Focus on equity
In addition to coordinating the operations of the LHS E-STaR network, SCALE-LHS will support LHS’s equity-focused activities—LHS’s newest area of expertise—through the creation of the LHS Equity Collaborative and monthly equity workshops. It will also conduct annual assessments of the 16 LHS E-STaR centers, compile the latest knowledge and disseminate it across the network.
“LHS is an evolving science, and Penn, through this new SCALE-LHS Center, will now be able to advance the science of how health systems implement LHS principles, particularly in the areas of equity and community engagement,” Aisola said. “The Center’s primary work will be to catalyze the impact of embedded learning among health systems scientists in achieving national goals of delivering valuable, high-quality health care and outcomes.”
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