Implementation research to reduce unhelpful ed care: iIMPROVE ED

Implementation research to reduce unhelpful ed care: iIMPROVE ED Professor Diana Egerton-Warburton outlines the benefits of a Learning Health System (LHS) approach, which integrates stakeholder input, research, and data-driven practices to enhance healthcare quality. Research demonstrates that 10% of healthcare causes patient harm and 30% provides little or no benefit; we call this ‘unhelpful care’ (Smith et al., 2013). That equates to four out of every ten episodes of healthcare that are either harmful or ineffective. At the same time, Emergency Departments internationally are in crisis, with overcrowding, ambulance ramping, and patients unable to access acute care when they need it most. This causes serious harm to patients and the healthcare system, including mortality (Morley et al., 2018). Improving access to emergency care is a wicked, intractable problem that has long defied clinicians, researchers and policymakers. Reducing unhelpful emergency care represents an elegantly ‘simple’ yet powerful opportunity to increase the capacity of the acute healthcare system to provide high- quality care at a lower cost to patients, the community, and the environment.