Evidence Mobilization Action Collaborative
Supporting the conditions necessary for transforming real world experiences into valuable data that are routinely used to improve population and patient-level health
As one of four action collaboratives under the National Academy of Medicine’s Leadership Consortium, the Evidence Mobilization Action Collaborative (EMAC) promotes the systematic capture of real-world health and medical experiences to improve the evidence that is used for decision-making at every level of health and health care. The EMAC aims to identify and advance best practices for generating, collecting, analyzing, and applying real-world data.
The health system generates myriad data points in the process of monitoring, evaluating, and intervening to improve patient health. Yet, much of these data are not captured or used in ways that significantly improve the health system. The EMAC aims to ensure that valuable evidence is routinely studied, strategically applied, and widely disseminated to promote a health system that can learn and improve, ultimately providing people with the health they deserve at costs they can afford.
Strategic Framework | Winter 2020 Update | Summer 2019 Update
Richard Kuntz, MD, MSc (Co-Chair)
Richard Platt, MD, MS (Co-Chair)
Action Collaborative Description
The constantly increasing diversity and sophistication of health care interventions hold great promise for gains in patient health, but also raise substantial challenges to the pace and nature of research about the effectiveness of treatments. Clinical research is straining to keep up with the rapid and iterative evolution of medical interventions and the innovation that occurs in clinical practice. It has become clear that, while trials are key especially to pre-market assessment of safety and efficacy, depending on trials is impractical — in both time and cost — for the information needed on effectiveness and efficiency. Recent enhancements in the nation’s capacity for clinical effectiveness research (CER), and the characterization of the broad range of CER questions of national priority, underscore the need to accelerate the development and use of innovative approaches for learning about what works best for whom and under what circumstances. Such information is critical for clinical and policy decisions and requires more nimble and efficient approaches that take advantage of emerging statistical tools and techniques, research designs and analytic models that can be applied across broader population groups, and information developed as a natural byproduct of the care process.
Accelerated initiative within the research community is essential for progress — particularly to improve the targeting, tailoring, sequencing of approaches to develop a totality of evidence. Efforts to enhance the use of genomic information, probability and other models that accelerate the timeliness and level of research insights gained, and the development of virtual intervention studies also offer increased prospects for transformative change in clinical outcomes research.
Individual researchers with research innovation interests, capacity, and activities from public and private organizations, leading academic research institutions, insurers, health product manufacturing companies, and product assessment companies. The aim is for an inclusive Collaborative—without walls—and participation in individual projects is structured according to interest, need, and practicality.
Organizations
- Association of American Medical Colleges
- AstraZeneca
- Brigham and Women’s Hospital
- Bristol-Myers Squibb
- Cedars-Sinai Medical Center
- Center for Medical Technology Policy
- Duke Clinical Research Institute
- Harvard Medical School
- Harvard School of Public Health
- Institute for Clinical and Economic Review
- Institute for Clinical Research and Health
- Policy Studies, Tufts Medical Center
- Johnson & Johnson
- Kaiser Permanente
- Mayo Clinic
- Outcome Sciences Inc.,
- University of California, Davis
- University of California, Irvine
- University of California, Los Angeles
- University of Minnesota School of Public Health
- University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine
- University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing
- University of Pittsburgh
- U.S. Department of Health & Human Services
- Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality
- Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services
- Food and Drug Administration
- National Institutes of Health
- Office of the Secretary
- U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
- Vanderbilt University Medical Center
- World Health Information Science Consultants
Discussion Papers
- Clinician Engagement for Continuous Learning
- The Common Rule and Continuous Improvement in Health Care: A Learning Health System Perspective
- Making the Case for Continuous Learning from Routinely Collected Data
- Revisiting the Common Rule and Continuous Improvement in Health Care: A Learning Health System Perspective
Activities
Projects completed, under way, or under consideration by EMAC include:
- Field advancement mapping. Cooperative development of a White Paper exploring the major institutional, organizational, and regulatory challenges and opportunities for expediting clinical effectiveness research.
- Engaging health system leadership in CER. A program of work that begins by engaging health system leadership on issues and opportunities to transform how evidence is generated and used to improve health and the value of delivered care as a fundamental part of their institutional processes, and provides a neutral forum to discuss and share insights from ongoing evidence application and development efforts.
- Advancing the use of “small data” in continuous learning. Cooperative development of a working group to explore how a continuous learning system can generate knowledge and insights at the population level, while improving the precision of the application of results from rich, patient-generated data at the individual level.
- Eliminating disparities. An exploration of how features of a continuously learning health system can best address and close the gaps for our most salient health and health care disparities, with particular focus on opportunities from innovation in clinical effectiveness research.
Meetings
In-person attendance at meetings is by invitation only due to room capacity limitations. All meetings are available by webcast, and information on joining the webcast is available on the meeting event page as the meeting approaches.
Past Meetings:
For more information, contact LeadershipConsortium@nas.edu
