Greetings from Alaska flight 3, Reagan National to Seattle-Tacoma, seat 16C.
I’m on my way home after a great day at the Institute of Medicine’s Digital Learning Collaborative workshop. The overall goal behind the conversation was to identify core gaps and opportunities around creating feedback loops in the health system — how can we accelerate capturing learning about what works, and then integrate it back into general practice.
The room was full of smart folks and there were a ton of great observations, but the two themes that really stuck with me were:
- It’s clear that to make real improvements we have to reach beyond the office visit and find ways to bridge between the “real lives” of citizens/consumers and the traditional healthcare world.
- There is a ton of research and pilots running on either side of this bridge, but not a lot that reaches across it — and there is a perception that doing that work is really difficult.
Interestingly, not very long ago I was at the USENIX workshop on Health Security and Privacy*** — a very different conference (much longer hair than at IOM) — but exactly the same themes emerged from those sessions.
