Dr Brenton Fargnoli Discusses the Creation of a Learning Health System

Brenton Fargnoli, MD, medical director of value-based care and director of product marketing and strategy at Flatiron Health, predicts the future of the learning health system in the United States.

Transcript

Do you see the trappings of a real, learning health system taking place in the United States? How much further do we have to go before it is fully functioning?

In 2007, the Institute of Medicine came out and called for the establishment of the learning healthcare system. The notion that we can improve patient outcomes from learning from every single patient.

Now we’re 10 years later and I think that what we’ve learned is that before we can have this learning healthcare system we really need a learning healthcare platform and that’s really a challenging data problem. Particularly so in oncology. You need to take in and bring together structured [electronic health record] data, curated data from unstructured notes and even additional data sources altogether into this consistent overarching data representation. Then do that on a national scale. Connecting community oncologists across the country on a common platform and so this all takes time.

We’re in the early innings, but we’re getting there.