The Chicago-based American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) has endorsed of the core values of a learning health system (LHS) that it maintains supports an effort to share secure, high-quality data to improve patient health.
As explained by AHIMA, the LHS concept represents a transformative vision of data, information, and knowledge sharing to empower all stakeholders to routinely engage in virtuous cycles of continuous learning and improvement. It envisions a system in which physicians and clinicians, care delivery systems, public health programs and clinical research facilities routinely and securely aggregate data from disparate sources, convert the data into information and share this intelligence in timely and actionable formats to help patients, caregivers and others make informed health decisions.
A recent Journal of AHIMA article profiled the LHS and why it is needed.
Citing several Institute of Medicine reports on inefficiencies in healthcare and the possibility for medical errors, developers of the LHS concept designed it as a way to meet these challenges and improve the healthcare system. As part of its endorsement, AHIMA joins the Learning Health Community, a coalition of healthcare organizations committed to advancing the LHS values.
“AHIMA recognizes that needs are evolving from simply translating health data to providing instant access to health intelligence that not only drives clinical and administrative decision-making in real time, but arms physicians and their patients with trustworthy information they need to make health decisions,” said AHIMA CEO Lynne Thomas Gordon, in a prepared statement. “The core values of a learning health system, including access to secure, accurate health information are in line with AHIMA’s long-standing commitment to quality healthcare through quality information.”
