HealthPathways: Procedural memory for Learning Health Systems

Background: Learning health systems (LHSs) pursuing the Quintuple Aim struggle to get knowledge into practice. Care pathways can translate evidence and policy into point-of-care action, but are challenging to implement at scale.

 

Approach: HealthPathways is a care pathways collaborative that has scaled across health systems in five countries, covering 35 million people. It functions as a procedural memory for LHSs, saving evidence, policy, and local knowledge in a form that directly influences clinical practice. We describe a narrative review of the emerging evidence base.

 

Results: There is growing evidence of improvements to care team experience, embedding of new models of care, and economic impacts, however most studies have been retrospective and observational. There is a need for prospective, equity-stratified evaluations and economic studies across sites.

 

Implications: By capturing and supporting continuous improvement of local care HealthPathways enables iterative learning, ensuring that quality and efficiency gains persist despite health system changes. This creates opportunities to reduce unwarranted variation in care, enhance health equity, and scale integrated care across sectors. As a reusable process memory, HealthPathways can stabilise and spread integrated care improvements.