More Details on the Learning Health Systems Panel

In 2018, the AHRQ Evidence-based Practice Center (EPC) Program started a project to enhance learning health systems' adoption of evidence to improve the quality and effectiveness of patient care. To do this, it convened a learning health systems panel to inform the development of products and tools that will help health systems use findings from EPC evidence reviews. The learning health systems panel generated ideas, provided feedback, and made improvements to products and tools. In 2020-21, learning health systems represented in the panel implemented and evaluated materials. To conduct this 3-year project, the American Institutes for Research (AIR) was supported by Kaiser Permanente Northwest, the University of California, San Francisco, and expert consultants.

The activities and accomplishments have been summarized here.

Key tasks and activities included:

• Convene a learning health systems panel.
  • Convene a panel of representatives from a diverse group of 11 learning health systems to gather ideas, feedback, and recommendations on topics of interest to health systems, products and tools to help health systems use findings from evidence reviews, and other methods to improve the usefulness and uptake of evidence review findings.
  • AHRQ funded five evidence review topics nominated by members of the learning health systems panel. These topics include: strategies for patient and family engagement, interventions to decrease hospital length of stay, prehabilitation and rehabilitation for major joint replacement surgery, diagnostic errors in the emergency department, and telehealth during COVID-19.
• Develop products.
  • Develop products that learning health systems can use to assess and integrate EPC evidence review findings into routine operations, including a Summary of Findings tool to help the user quickly evaluate the relevance of evidence. This tool includes brief, summarized information about key review findings; review questions; contextual information about other related systematic reviews and clinical guidelines; clinical and policy implications; and review limitations. This tool and others, including a data visualization tool, will be available to users via a dynamic, interactive website.
  • Conduct virtual cognitive testing of new materials with potential product end-users at learning health systems.
• Implement and evaluate.
  • Work with learning health systems to tailor implementation plans to their local context and needs.
  • Implement and evaluate products and tools with each participating learning health system.
  • Revise products based on the evaluation.
  • Describe strategies to overcome implementation challenges, including contextual information about audience characteristics that might affect usability and adoptability.