The GW Learning Health Systems Lab (GWLHS) aims to develop research and tools to stimulate LHSs and to educate the future healthcare workforce to operate within LHSs.
GWLHS is physically located at GW in Washington, DC, but in practice, the lab is actively collaborating with numerous national and international scholars and practitioners led by Dr. Paige McDonald, GW.
Dr. Paige McDonald, the Director of the GWLHS, believes that operationalizing LHSs at various scales is critical to evidenced-based knowledge translation leading to better health outcomes and to greater equity in health and healthcare. Additional research and collaboration is required to recognize this vision on a local and global scale. To this end, she partnered with colleagues Drs. Philip van der Wees and Kenneth Harwood, GW, on research to identify requisite competencies for operationalizing LHSs and on piloting clinician training on how to enact LHSs in Physical Therapy practice. Simultaneously, this team formed an international steering committee to promote collaboration and research toward stimulating LHSs. Now known as “The International Network for Enacting LHSs (INACT-LHS),” this group has since developed the LHS Toolkit to stimulate global enactment of LHSs at various levels of scale.
Collectively, the leaders and collaborators of GWLHS value and model interdisciplinary and multi- stakeholder collaborations. These diverse relationships advance the science and operationalization of LHSs.