In this podcast, we invite Dr. Gabrielle Rude, President and Executive Director of the Wisconsin Collaboarative for Healthcare Quality, for a conversation about what it takes to design and build a state-wide learning health system. For over 20 years the WCHQ has collected and analyzed outcome data from a variety of health care institutions across Wisconsin. The Collaborative established local metrics for these institutions, as wells educated clinicians and coached leaders, and created reports that permitted clinics and hospitals to develop data-driven quality improvement (QI) programs.

By investing in the infrastructure to provide data, education and facilitation to health care organizations that did not have adequate resources to do their own QI, WCHQ empowered small- to mid-size health systems not only to compete but collaborate with one another. (and were under pressure from CMS to develop it).

We explore how the WCHA has moved Wisconsin over time toward something that looks like a head start on realizing a regional LHS, and discuss what it would mean to potentially connect the WCHQ's infrastructure and network with larger partners such as UW Health--and to harness the organization's work to support a large-scale statewide LHS enterprise.

The WCHQ continues to build on its groundbreaking work by facilitating cross-industry as well as institution data sharing. They also facilitate conversations with and convene those resource partners that can help healthcare systems meet their needs, aligning stakeholder efforts to take on the thorniest health issues we face in the US. One outcome of this is that Wisconsin boasts one of the highest patient performance rates on quality measures across the country.

Join us to learn more about what it has taken – and will take- to put together the missing pieces of the needed partnership puzzle to continue ramping up not just Wisconsin's but the Midwest's capacity to meet the challenges of access to health care and health equity via a regional learning health system.