Report by Marianne Burke, PhD student

I attended a presentation by Richard Platt MD, Chair of Population Health at Harvard Pilgrim Health Care (HPHC) Institute, November 8 2014. Chicago Ill AAMC Conference, Matheson Lecture entitled “On a Clear Day You Can See the Learning Health System.”

Dr. Platt discussed the work of the HPHC Institute as the Coordinating Center of the National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network funded with a 9 million grant from PCORI (Patient Centered Clinical Research Institute). He introduced the presentation by stating that there are so many patient care questions for which there are no evidence-based answers, and that we (medical professionals) have overestimated what we know. He stated that less than 15% of medical guidelines are supported by firm evidence. Most are expert opinion or consensus of practice. He made the case for finding the problems in large data surveillance sets even as we try use these sets more often and try to combine them to answer patient centered questions.

The Matheson Lecture “at the juncture of Technology, Informatics and Medical Library Science” occurs annually at AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges) co-sponsored by the AAMC Group on Information Resources and the Association of Academic Health Sciences Libraries.

This lecture was interesting and well-documented though not surprising to me as a CTS student (of our excellent faculty) and medical librarian.