How:

Your plans for delivering decision support to meet key health and care goals should take into account the key role that decision support plays in creating a learning health and care system.

Learning Health and Care Systems (LHS) support three core activities:

1. Capturing service and care activity and experience and converting this into ‘real world evidence’.
2. Combining this real-world evidence with traditional research evidence.
3. Using this combination of real-world and research evidence to improve care.

A LHS should provide the infrastructure to make quality improvement or audit cycles far more efficient, enabling:

• Identification of gaps and deficiencies in care – for example, through electronic record data, other service data or patient/service-reported outcomes and evidence from lived experience.
• Uncovering of the causes of these gaps – for example, using analytics tools.
• Identification of solutions – for example, using published evidence and guidance, combined with practitioner and service user insights.
• Testing of proposed solutions.
• Dissemination and implementation of solutions, for example using decision support systems such as the RDS.

Figure 4 below shows the pivotal role of decision support in a learning health and care system. More information is provided in Annex 1.

Figure 4: Representation of decision support role within a Learning Health and Care System