The University of Pennsylvania proposes a training program for junior faculty: Transforming the Generation and Adoption of PCOR in Practice (T-GAPP). T-GAPP is designed to advance the nation's leadership capacity in deploying patient-centered outcomes research within learning health systems (LHS). This program is directed by Drs. Stephen Kimmel, MD, MSCE and David A. Asch, MD, MBA, supported by a team of core LHS competency leaders and a diversity director.
The specific aim of the program is to recruit and train future leaders in patient centered outcomes research (PCOR) methods and conduct PCOR research in a LHS.
This aim i s consistent with our own mission, because we seek to deploy the academic expertise of our university, with its schools of Medicine (Perelman; PSOM), Nursing, Business (Wharton), and others toward improvements in health and health care. Penn Medicine is a 6 hospital health system, the largest in eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Entirely owned and operated by a university, it has distinguished itself by seeing its academic connection as a strategic and synergistic advantage?bringing scholarship into the clinical enterprise and creating a laboratory for the academic enterprise. Within this environment, we have designed a two year training program blending didactic and experiential learning, all under the direction of experienced mentoring teams. PSOM provides both long-standing, highly successful formal research training programs and a leading center for health care innovation, composed of physicians, nurses, designers, project managers, software engineers, and others who embed themselves alongside patients, families, and clinicians, with the fundamental goal of improving health, health care, and patient and family experience. The program includes: 1) required courses in LHS and PCOR methods in order to provide all scholars with an in-depth understanding of research design and execution, 2) formal masters- level training for scholars without this prior training, (3) a year-long LHS workshop designed to demonstrate the application of core competencies in LHS research and implementation, 4) a learning practicum within Penn Medicine's Center for Health Care Innovation, 5) formal training in leadership development, 6) stakeholder engagement, 7) development and completion of a research project in PCOR/LHS under the direction of the mentorship team that includes a research scientist, quantitative expert, and health system administrator, 8) guided development of at least one grant proposal and 9) participation and presentations at national meetings. Well-trained scientists in PCOR must have an understanding of organizational sensibilities and leaders of LHS will fail without an understanding of evidence and how it is created and used. We believe leadership in this area requires skills in research and in management, and we aim to support both.
The learning health system (LHS) is a new and rapidly evolving delivery system where, in its ideal, each patient encounter provides an opportunity to make the next patient encounter better. This program aims to develop the human capital to support that ideal. We will develop new LHS leaders by training junior faculty to apply patient centered outcomes research (PCOR) methods and conduct PCOR research within the opportunities and challenges of functioning health systems.
