Training the next generation of delivery science researchers: 10‐year experience of a post‐doctoral research fellowship program within an integrated care system

Abstract

IntroductionLearning health systems require a workforce of researchers trained in the methods of identifying and overcoming barriers to effective, evidence‐based care. Most existing postdoctoral training programs, such as NIH‐funded postdoctoral T32 awards, support basic and epidemiological science with very limited focus on rigorous delivery science methods for improving care. In this report, we present the 10‐year experience of developing and implementing a Delivery Science postdoctoral fellowship embedded within an integrated health care delivery system.MethodsIn 2012, the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research designed and implemented a 2‐year postdoctoral Delivery Science Fellowship research training program to foster research expertise in identifying and addressing barriers to evidence‐based care within health care delivery systems.ResultsSince 2014, 20 fellows have completed the program. Ten fellows had PhD‐level scientific training, and 10 fellows had clinical doctorates (eg, MD, RN/PhD, PharmD). Fellowship alumni have graduated to faculty research positions at academic institutions (9), and research or clinical organizations (4). Seven alumni now hold positions in Kaiser Permanente's clinical operations or medical group (7).ConclusionsThis delivery science fellowship program has succeeded in training graduates to address delivery science problems from both research and operational perspectives. In the next 10 years, additional goals of the program will be to expand its reach (eg, by developing joint research training models in collaboration with clinical fellowships) and strengthen mechanisms to support transition from fellowship to the workforce, especially for researchers from underrepresented groups.

Evaluation of an interdisciplinary education program to foster learning health systems (Preprint)

“…The shared LHS framework and increased mutual understanding from these programs is increasing trust and collaborative opportunities, leading towards joint translational LHS innovation programs within the health services. We hope future educators and academic leaders see promise in our emerging LHS education evaluation work [15], other descriptions of LHS education initiatives [6][7][8][9][10][11], and the success of LHS initiatives in healthcare practice [33][34][35].…”

“…While there are previous studies that have described their LHS-focused programs, few have robustly evaluated the utility of their implementations. Furthermore, other programs have focused on specific cohorts of participants such as: PhD students [6], post-doctoral students [7,8], and clinical fellows [9][10][11] in the United States [6,[9][10][11] and Canada [7].…”

“…Our study adds new insights to the literature given the interprofessional nature of the program, as well as its design (flipped classroom, working groups) and delivery (wholly online). To our knowledge, few programs have involved teaching a structured curriculum [8,12], while other programs have involved mainly project based work and on the job learning [7,10,13,14].…”

“…Participants were asked to rate agreement for usefulness (extremely useless to extremely useful) and engagement (extremely unengaged to engaged), weekly for each topic(1)(2)(3)(4)(5)(6)(7)(8)(9)(10)(11)(12)(13). Participants' ratings of value pertaining to various domains: overall value to personal career development for all topics, applicability to current workplace role for all topics, overall satisfaction with quality of course, recommendation, instructors, and choice to revisit; and value of educational activities: instructors, Zoom workshops, Canvas pre-class activities, collaborative learning, the diabetes case scenario, Jupyter notebooks and discussion boards.…”

Partnership-building considerations for implementation science in learning health systems: a case study of the Implementation Science Collaborative in Alberta, Canada

“…There is growing interest in the IS community to resolve misalignments between implementation researchers and support practitioners that limit the uptake of IS. Training models have been developed to build a cadre of highly trained implementation researchers (17,18). Similarly, teams continue to develop implementation support practitioner competencies to facilitate the uptake of evidence-based change using IS models and frameworks (19,20).…”