A Learning Health System – The Digital Version

I wrote a post for the HIMSS blog in the week leading up to the recent annual conference, where I served as a social media ambassador. I used the idea of building a learning health system as a focal point for healthcare innovation and health IT.

Here’s the opening (read the rest over at the HIMSS blog):

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”  — Mahatma Gandhi 

We often give lip service to the idea of a learning health system, but we must all work to build it effectively and efficiently if we do not want our healthcare “system” to collapse under its own weight.

Over the past decade we have made great strides in the digitization of medicine. The challenge before us today is to extract insight and improvement from all those bits and bytes, to extract knowledge from all that data that is usable and that adds value to patient treatment, outcome and experience for all stakeholders in the healthcare system.

What are we all going to do to move healthcare and the health of individuals and populations in the right direction?

David Harlow
The Harlow Group LLC
Health Care Law and Consulting