New paper on learning health systems

Learning health systems carry much promise to transform healthcare services, delivering better, safer and more cost-effective care. However, research in the field is fragmented; many authors present solutions but fail to identify them as learning health systems. The paper presents a framework, named after the Norse god Heimdall, to address this problem, in order to help realise all that LHS promise. The review also identifies that the barriers to LHS implementation largely remain the same as the barriers to electronic health record adoption. LHS is inheriting still unsolved problems from the electronic health records on which they depend.

McLachlan S, Potts HWW, Dube K, Buchanan D, Lean S, Gallagher T, Johnson O, Daley B, Marsh W, Fenton N. The Heimdall framework for supporting characterisation of

learning health systems. J Innov Health Inform 2018;25(2):77–87. doi:10.14236/jhi.v25i2.996