THE LHS WORKGROUP AT SW CACTI
BIOBANKING SERVICES
Two states, two universities, multiple health delivery models — and a natural experiment in how a Learning Health System actually gets built.
The Southwest Center for Advancing Clinical and Translational Innovation (SW CACTI) is the NIH/NCATS Clinical and Translational Science Award hub shared by the University of New Mexico and the University of Arizona, with Banner Health as a key clinical partner. The Learning Health Systems Workgroup is a resource for clinical and translational science across the hub.
The workgroup’s premise is that SW CACTI’s partner systems differ meaningfully in structure, clinical integration, data maturity, and governance — and that this difference is an asset. Comparing and contrasting how the LHS model takes hold across a large integrated private system and an academic health system in two different states produces knowledge that neither site could generate alone.
Membership is deliberately multidisciplinary: clinicians, clinical informaticists, data analysts, health services researchers, health economists, dissemination and implementation scientists, and patient and community partners.
Year One goals
| Goal | What it means |
|---|---|
| Goal 1 Survey and inventory | Survey existing LHS models and establish a baseline inventory of resources and processes across the partner systems. |
| Goal 2 Educate | Educate intramural and extramural audiences about the LHS — through this site, lectures, invited speakers, and publications. |
| Goal 3 Barriers and facilitators | Identify what enables and what obstructs operationalizing a two-state, multi-health-system CTSA Learning Health System. |
How the workgroup connects
- Health informatics. Transferable, standards-based solutions — including OMOP common-data-model and AI tooling — for assessing geographic variation in practice and quality, sharing new evidence at the point of decision, and improving the conduct of pragmatic research in real-world settings.
- Dissemination & implementation science. Joint work to improve adoption of evidence-based practice and to operationalize D&I within New Mexico and Arizona health systems.
- Clinical and translational research programs. Support for the LHS component of hub research projects, and for pilots focused on learning health system questions.
- Strategic management and evaluation. Reporting, oversight, goal-setting, and continuous quality improvement for the workgroup itself.
- The national community. Active connection to the Learning Health Systems–CTSA Partnerships Working Group and its subcommittees on landscape assessment, best-practice resources, community of practice, and partnership success stories.
Work in progress
Proposed activity includes an embedded LHS data scientist pilot with Banner Health’s multidisciplinary clinical consensus groups — placing an analyst inside an operational quality initiative, with topics chosen by clinical leadership, de-identified data, and findings returned to the group in a repeating cycle of measurement and refinement. Alongside it, the workgroup is documenting the barriers and facilitators encountered along the way, so that other hubs do not have to rediscover them.
