Ten leaders at Seattle Children's, vital to the development of their enterprise analytics program, participated in comprehensive in-depth interviews. The leadership roles explored in interviews included Chief Data & Analytics Officer, Director of Research Informatics, Principal Systems Architect, Manager of Bioinformatics and High Throughput Analytics, Director of Neurocritical Care, Strategic Program Manager & Neuron Product Development Lead, Director of Dev Ops, Director of Clinical Analytics, Data Science Manager, and Advance Analytics Product Engineer. The interviews, featuring unstructured conversations, sought to understand the experiences of leadership in establishing enterprise analytics at Seattle Children's.
By adopting an entrepreneurial mindset and agile development processes, characteristic of startup environments, Seattle Children's has developed a sophisticated enterprise analytics ecosystem which is fully integrated into their daily procedures. Within integrated service lines, Multidisciplinary Delivery Teams employed an iterative strategy to deliver high-value analytics projects. Service line leadership, coupled with the leadership of the Delivery Team, spearheaded the team's achievement by establishing project priorities, outlining project budgets, and maintaining oversight of their analytics efforts. Ko143 ic50 The organizational layout at Seattle Children's has produced a variety of analytic tools which have improved both operational procedures and clinical patient care.
Seattle Children's has successfully established a robust, scalable, and near real-time analytics ecosystem, demonstrating how a leading healthcare system can derive significant value from the ever-increasing volume of health data.
Seattle Children's has presented a model for how a top healthcare organization can establish a robust, scalable, and near real-time analytics ecosystem, providing significant value from the ever-growing trove of health data.
In addition to providing direct benefit to participants, clinical trials offer crucial evidence for guiding decision-making. Sadly, clinical trials often fail, struggling with the recruitment of participants and bearing significant financial expenses. The lack of interconnectedness within clinical trials impedes the prompt sharing of data, the extraction of relevant insights, the implementation of targeted interventions, and the recognition of knowledge gaps, thereby impacting trial conduct. A learning health system (LHS) is a suggested model for enabling continuous learning and progress in diverse areas of healthcare. We advocate for the use of an LHS approach to meaningfully enhance clinical trials, supporting continuous improvements in the efficiency and execution of trial procedures. Ko143 ic50 The development of a robust trial data-sharing mechanism, combined with the constant evaluation of trial recruitment and related success measures, and the creation of targeted interventions to improve trials, are likely to be crucial components of a Trials Learning Health System that reflects a continuous cycle of learning and enables ongoing trial enhancements. Clinical trials, when approached as a system through the development and deployment of a Trials LHS, yield benefits for patients, enhance healthcare, and reduce costs for stakeholders.
Academic medical centers' clinical departments are focused on delivering clinical care, providing education and training, fostering faculty growth, and promoting scholarly investigation and excellence. Ko143 ic50 These departments have faced a constant increase in the need to bolster the quality, safety, and value of their care delivery. Sadly, a critical gap exists in the number of clinical faculty members with expertise in improvement science across many academic departments, which impedes their capacity to lead initiatives, provide instruction, and create original research. This article focuses on a scholarly enhancement program in a medical department, delving into its structure, activities, and early achievements.
A Quality Program, meticulously crafted by the Department of Medicine at the University of Vermont Medical Center, is dedicated to refining care delivery, offering education and training programs, and encouraging research in improvement science. The program acts as a resource hub for students, trainees, and faculty, offering education, training, analytical assistance, consultation on design and methodology, and project management support. Its goal is to combine education, research, and care delivery, to learn from evidence, and ultimately improve the quality of healthcare.
The Quality Program, during its first three full years of operation, facilitated an average of 123 projects annually. This encompassed prospective clinical quality enhancements, a retrospective examination of clinical programs and practices, and the creation and assessment of educational programs. The projects' output includes 127 scholarly products, consisting of peer-reviewed publications, abstracts, posters, and oral presentations delivered at local, regional, and national conferences.
The Quality Program provides a practical model to promote improvement science scholarship, care delivery training, and advancements in care delivery, all of which support the objectives of a learning health system at the academic clinical department level. Improvement in care delivery and the promotion of academic success in improvement science for faculty and trainees are possible through dedicated resources within such departments.
By serving as a practical model, the Quality Program can drive improvement in care delivery, facilitate training in improvement science, and encourage scholarship, thereby promoting the objectives of a learning health system within an academic clinical department. The presence of dedicated resources in such departments presents an opportunity to improve care delivery, thereby furthering the academic progress of both faculty and trainees, particularly in the field of improvement science.
The integration of evidence-based practice within learning health systems (LHSs) is a vital aspect of the system. Through its meticulous systematic reviews, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) produces evidence reports, which assemble available evidence concerning designated topics. Despite the AHRQ Evidence-based Practice Center (EPC) program's production of high-quality evidence reviews, their use and usability in practice are not automatically guaranteed or encouraged.
In order to increase the utility of these reports for local health systems (LHSs) and to accelerate the spread of research findings, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has awarded a contract to the American Institutes for Research (AIR) and its Kaiser Permanente ACTION (KPNW ACTION) partner to conceive and implement web-based tools aimed at rectifying the gap in the distribution and integration of evidence-practice reports within local health systems. Between 2018 and 2021, a co-production approach was utilized to complete this work across three distinct phases: activity planning, co-design, and implementation. The techniques used, the obtained results, and their meaning for future research are discussed.
LHSs can leverage web-based information tools, offering clinically relevant summaries with clear visual representations from AHRQ EPC systematic evidence reports, to raise awareness and improve accessibility of EPC reports, thereby formalizing and strengthening their evidence review infrastructure, fostering the development of system-specific protocols and care pathways, enhancing practice at the point of care, and promoting training and education initiatives.
Co-designed tools, implementation facilitated, developed an approach enabling wider access to EPC reports and the application of systematic review results to support evidence-based practices in LHSs.
Through the co-design and facilitated implementation of these tools, a method for increasing the accessibility of EPC reports emerged, along with greater application of systematic review outcomes to support evidence-based procedures within local healthcare systems.
In a contemporary learning health system, enterprise data warehouses (EDWs) provide the essential infrastructure, storing clinical and other system-wide data for research, strategic planning, and quality enhancement initiatives. To further the existing partnership between Northwestern University's Galter Health Sciences Library and the Northwestern Medicine Enterprise Data Warehouse (NMEDW), a comprehensive clinical research data management (cRDM) program was implemented to strengthen the clinical data workforce and expand library support services for the university community.
The clinical database architecture, clinical coding standards, and translating research questions into data extraction queries are all part of the training program's curriculum. This program's description, encompassing its partners and driving forces, along with its technical and societal components, the incorporation of FAIR principles into clinical data research workflows, and the potential long-term impact to serve as a model for clinical research, with support for library and EDW partnerships at other institutions.
Improved support services for researchers, a direct outcome of this training program, have strengthened the partnership between our institution's health sciences library and clinical data warehouse, resulting in a more efficient training workflow. Instruction on the best methods for preserving and disseminating research outputs empowers researchers to boost the reproducibility and reusability of their work, which positively affects both the researchers and the university. Publicly available training resources are now provided for those supporting this critical need at other institutions, enabling them to enhance our collaborative efforts.
The integration of library-based partnerships is instrumental in strengthening clinical data science capacity within learning health systems through training and consultation. Galter Library and the NMEDW's cRDM program underscores the significance of collaborative partnerships, expanding upon past collaborations to deliver comprehensive clinical data support services and training throughout the campus.