According to the university, the center will provide instructional and experiential learning opportunities for clinicians and researchers in learning health systems science.
”Health systems across the world often face similar problems, such as poor utilization of resources, rising costs and disparities in access to care,” said Ming Tai-Seale, a professor of family medicine at UCSD School of Medicine and principal investigator on the new grant. ”I envision that the new center will help our researchers and clinicians understand and overcome these system-level challenges and accelerate our progress toward a highly reliable
learning health system.”
In a learning health system, research and clinical practice are interwoven to bridge the gap between available evidence and its application in the clinic or at the bedside, a UCSD statement reads.
”Improving health care isn’t always about developing new treatments,” Tai-Seale said. ”It’s also about improving the way we deliver health care through improving patient-provider communication, helping underserved populations access care and even reducing burnout among health care workers.
”In a learning health system, all of these complex factors affecting health care can be studied systematically while simultaneously bringing new knowledge into clinical practice,” she said.
The new center will encourage collaboration among UCSD faculty across eight different departments.
The center will include three cores. Tai-Seale will lead the Administrative Core, which manage and provide oversight for the center. UCSD School of Medicine professor Dr. Michael Hogarth, will lead the Research Data and Analytics Core, which will provide data science expertise to scientists within the center. Finally, Dr. Crystal Wiley Cené will lead the Research
Education core, which will support research projects and provide mentorship opportunities to scientists within the center.
According to the university, trainees in the center will take courses through UCSD to learn the principles and practices of learning health systems science. In their second and third years of training, trainees will be ”empowered to complete their own projects and put their findings to practice in the clinic,” a UCSD statement reads.
”A true, complete learning health system is still just an ideal right now, but this center will bring us significantly closer to achieving that ideal,” said Tai-Seale. ”We hope that this initiative will improve health care here within San Diego county and establish us as a world leader in this new and evolving approach to improving health care.”