Supporting the Effective Application of Evidence in Learning Health Systems

Healthcare organizers across Canada are keen to move from traditional health system setups to learning health systems. Learning health systems collect lessons from everyday care to speed up quality improvement, and to rapidly implement cutting-edge health research into practice (e.g. rapidly studying and optimizing the processes and outcomes of telehealth visits as replacements for in-person clinical visits during COVID-19). By doing so, learning health systems aim to improve patient and provider experiences, improve health outcomes, make systems more fair and equitable, and ensure value for money. Many researchers, health system staff, and policy-makers are working to make learning health systems the norm, but there are still many steps to figure out. One such step is how to apply the lessons learned from systems studying their own processes and outcomes. Who needs to be involved in applying these lessons? How do we get these people together and build processes to apply lessons learned? This study seeks to answer these questions by studying the dynamics of Alberta's community of implementors (people who apply lessons in different parts of the healthcare system) and by interviewing the Implementation Science Collaborative, a large-scale initiative that works to help systems successfully apply lessons learned in Alberta's learning health system. This study will create knowledge around how to coordinate implementors and apply lessons in ways that improve the quality and value of health care.