Massachusetts Institute for Equity-Focused Learning Health System Science (MIELHSS)

Overall Project Summary Never in our lifetimes has there been a greater collective focus on health or the need to address the wide disparities we face as a country in health outcomes. The Massachusetts Institute for Equity-Focused Learning Health System Science (MIELHSS) brings together an alliance of FQHCs, Safety Net Hospitals, Community Clinics, Patients, PCORnet sites, and leading academic health systems who share a common purpose to accelerate research and train the future workforce to advance learning health system science, address disparities, and improve health outcomes for the U.S. The overarching objective of MIELHSS is to develop scientists in embedded research, and accelerate innovation in human-centered, equity-focused learning health system (E-LHS) science. Our framework for training and learning is based on the quintuple aim of healthcare: better health, improved patient experiences, care team wellbeing, and health equity, at lower cost. We will develop future research leaders who can lead progress toward that goal. Our proposed curriculum, experiential activities, mentorship, partnerships, data, and programming provide the core competencies required to generate these innovative leaders in E-LHS science. Our specific aims are to: 1) Advance the development of a diverse workforce of embedded E-LHS scientists across the professional development lifecycle; 2) Accelerate enduring advancement in E- LHS science by adopting common data standards across a broad and diverse network of equity measures and social determinants of health; and 3) Forge a strong cross institutional alliance between community, safety net, academic health systems, patients, mentors, and scholars to drive widespread and enduring change. Our team has strong working relationships and deep and complementary experience across LHS Core Competencies and PCORI research, mentoring and training scholars including LHS scholars, and a shared commitment to addressing health equity for all. We will provide tailored training experiences across the professional lifecycle, community-wide engagement activities, data integration, methods development, and proactive dissemination to accelerate the spread of successful E-LHS research. We will measure success using traditional academic measures such as grant submissions and publications but also by measuring health system engagement in MIELHSS activities and sustained implementation and widespread adoption of interventions identified through this work.