Workshop: Identifying the Research Challenges Underlying a National-Scale Learning Health System

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It is widely acknowledged that improving health in the United States will require the creation of a national-scale Learning Health System. A Learning Health System (LHS) will allow the nation to take full advantage of advanced computational methods and the increasing amounts of health-related data available in digital form. An LHS would enable such data to be rapidly mobilized and continuously analyzed--and the results subsequently shared in "actionable" forms--to improve health care quality; empower public health and biomedical research; and enable patients and their families, along with their care providers, to make better-informed collaborative health decisions. The creation of an LHS at national scale is a monumental socio-technical challenge. These challenges invoke a broad scope of open fundamental scientific questions that, to date, have not been clearly identified. To address these issues we will undertake a road-mapping activity in the form of a two-day invitational workshop in Washington, DC. The workshop, engaging approximately 35 of the nation's leading scientists, will identify and describe these open questions, and will identify interrelationships among them. Participants will bring expertise spanning three broad challenge areas underlying a national-scaled LHS: 1) system requirements, modeling and performance; 2) data, knowledge, and analytics; and 3) organization, economics, and policy. These challenge areas invoke the computational/informational sciences and related fields of engineering, the behavioral and social sciences, and the biomedical sciences. The results of this workshop will provide clear direction for a next generation of research to address a class of problems of vital interest to health and well-being of individuals and populations. Also, because the challenges to be addressed in the workshop are profoundly interdisciplinary, the results will create potential for collaboration among groups of scientists who have not yet come together around these most important problems.