News

Penn Becomes National Coordinating Hub for Federal LHS E-STaR Network

Three Penn Medicine Researchers Get $3.8 Million Grant to Establish New Center

October 31, 2024

By:

Hoag Levins

Print:

Heading up the coordination center for a new AHRQ/PCORI embedded scientist training and research network are Penn physicians Meghan Lane-Fall, MD, Jaya Aysola, MD, and Jennifer Myers, MD.

Three LDI Senior Fellows and Penn Medicine researchers—Meghan Lane-Fall, Jaya Aysola, and Jennifer Myers—have received a $3.8 million grant to establish a national coordinating center for the new network of Learning Health System Embedded Scientist Training and Research (LHS E-STaR) Centers funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI).

Launched in January of this year, 16 LHS E-STaR centers across the country will train scientists to work directly within health systems to conduct research that can be rapidly applied internally to improve health outcomes and clinical services. The first five-years of the national program are funded at $80 million.

In making that launch announcement, AHRQ Director Robert Otto Valdez and PCOR Executive Director Nakela L. Cook said, “AHRQ and PCORI are committed to advancing the infrastructure and training that learning health systems need to conduct patient-centered comparative clinical effectiveness research (CER) that builds evidence that meets the needs of patients and clinicians at the point of care… The initiative will provide training and professional development for scientists in various care settings, engage communities and other health system stakeholders in novel ways, and promote research to improve health outcomes at the individual and population levels while enhancing health system operations.”

Internal Health System Research

The concept of learning health systems (LHS) emerged after the 2001 publication of the National Academy of Medicine’s (NAM) “Crossing the Quality Chasm Report.” The LHS philosophy was designed to address the health care shortcoming documented in that report, one of the most important of which was the slow dissemination of the latest evidence-based practices. In LHS institutions, clinical data and patient outcomes are used by researchers in a feedback loop to inform change and further research, enabling rapid learning and system adaptation.

The new LHS E-STaR programs will be training clinician scientists how to embed themselves as researchers within their own institutions to conduct internal analyses of the ongoing clinical and logistical operations.

The new Penn national coordinating center will be called the SCALE-LHS Hub, which stands for “Synthesize, Coordinate, Amplify, Learn, and Evaluate the AHRQ/PCORI LHS network.”

Overseeing the SCALE-LHS Hub as multiple principal investigators are Lane-Fall, MD, MSHP, LDI Senior Fellow, Professor and Executive Director of the Penn Implementation Science Center (PISCE); Aysola, MD, DTMH, LDI Senior Fellow, Associate Professor and Executive Director of the Penn Medicine Center for Health Equity Advancement (CHEA); and Myers, MD, LDI Senior Fellow, Professor and Director of the Penn Center for Healthcare Improvement and Patient Safety (CHIPS). The PISCE, CHEA, and CHIPS centers at the Perelman School of Medicine will be collaborators in the Penn SCALE-LHS Hub.

Equity Focus

Aside from coordinating LHS E-STaR network operations, SCALE-LHS will be supporting LHS activities focused on equity—the newest LHS competency domain—through the creation of an LHS Equity Collaborative and monthly equity seminars. It will also be conducting annual evaluations of the 16 LHS E-STaR centers and synthesizing the latest learnings and disseminating them across the network.

“LHS is an evolving science and now Penn through this new SCALE-LHS Hub will be able to advance the science of how health systems operationalize LHS principles, especially in the areas of equity and community engagement,” said Aysola. “The essential work of the Hub will be to catalyze the impact of embedded learning health system scientists in reaching the nation’s goals for high-value, high-quality health care and outcomes.”