This National Academy of Medicine (NAM) Special Publication summarizes a series of meetings the NAM hosted in 2016, which was sponsored by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, with support from NAM’s Executive Leadership Network. The series underscored the importance of partnerships between researchers and health system leadership and considered opportunities to build institutional capacity, cross-institutional synergy, and system-wide learning. During these meetings, health system executives, researchers, and others discussed building infrastructure that simultaneously facilitates care delivery, care improvement, and evidence development by leveraging available health care data. Health executives expressed the importance of having a networked evidence system and having an organization, such as PCORnet, to harness data and facilitate infrastructure development and operation. Additionally, participants highlighted the benefits of connecting with other agencies across numerous sectors to collect and analyze other data that impact health, such as factors of social determinants of health and behavior patterns. As discussed in Accelerating Medical Evidence Generation and Use: Summary of a Meeting Series, there are numerous opportunities for potential collaboration to refine tools and strategies in accessing data for a continuous learning health system in order to achieve these goals.
