Learning health systems: the research community awareness challenge

The learning health system (LHS) is one in which progress in science, informatics and care culture converges to continuously create new knowledge as a natural by-product of care processes. While LHS was first described over a decade ago, much of the recent published work that should fall within the domain of LHS fails to claim or be identified as such. This observation was confirmed through a review of papers published at the recent 2017 IEEE International Conference on Health Informatics (ICHI 2017), where no single LHS solution had been so identified. The authors lacked awareness that their work represented an LHS, or of any discrete classification for their work within the LHS domain. We believe this lack of awareness inhibits continued LHS research and prevents formation of a critical mass of researchers within the domain. Efforts to produce a framework and classification structure to enable confident identification of work with the LHS domain are urgently needed to address this pressing research community challenge.