Innovative programs exist that suggest that care for people with chronic conditions is optimized when patients and providers have the information they need at the point of care and over time, to engage in shared planning and execution of treatment goals and care plans. This project aims to build an Inflammatory Bowel Disease Learning Health System, a shared information environment, that highlights collaboration among patients, clinicians and care team members, and researchers; for effective use of data for guiding care, value, improvement, and research.
To demonstrate the impact of an Adult Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) Learning Health System approach the study collaborators will design, build, implement, and evaluate in up to 90 IBD care sites the the following four key components of the IBD Learning Health System: 1) a Health Information Technology (HIT) environment that can "feed-forward" Patient Reported Outcomes (PROs) and clinical data to be used at the point of care and integrated into a registry (IBD Plexus); 2) decision-support dashboards for use by patients and clinicians in real time to coproduce care; 3) meaningful reports for patients and clinicians; and 4) multi-stakeholder collaborative networks for improvement and research.
Prior work from Sweden and the US show that successful uptake of the model can offer important benefits. Patients will be able to use web-based tools to monitor their health and manage their care, securely share data with clinicians in a timely manner, visualize outcomes that matter to them, and compare their results to other people. Clinicians will have new information that can improve their ability to track patient outcomes and costs over time; use PRO data to support pre-visit planning, shared decision-making at the point of care, and post-visit monitoring; and receive comparative performance reports to support quality improvement, public reporting, and professional development. Researchers will benefit by having PROs and cost data added to data registries to support clinical, translational, and comparative effectiveness research.
