In 2022, Ivy joined the Learning Health Systems Rehabilitation Research Network to help connect real-world rehabilitation care with research. The partnership reflected a bigger idea that still matters at Ivy Health today: what we learn across thousands of patient experiences should help make care better for the people who come next.
Healthcare generates a lot of information every day. The harder part is turning what we learn from that information into something useful.
That was part of the thinking behind Ivy’s decision to join the Learning Health Systems Rehabilitation Research Network, or LeaRRn, in October 2022. Led by researchers from Brown University, Boston University, and the University of Pittsburgh, LeaRRn brought rehabilitation providers and researchers together around a shared goal: improving the quality, outcomes, and value of rehabilitation through collaborative research.
For Ivy, the opportunity was a natural fit. Our clinicians see patients across a wide range of ages, diagnoses, specialties, and communities. That creates an opportunity not only to provide care, but to learn from it.
What Is a Learning Health System?
A learning health system is built around a fairly simple idea: healthcare should get smarter as care is delivered.
Researchers and clinicians use information from everyday practice to ask questions, study what works, identify opportunities for improvement, and bring those lessons back into care. Instead of research living entirely apart from clinical practice, the two inform one another.
LeaRRn was created specifically to bring that model into rehabilitation. Its work connected academic researchers with health systems across the rehabilitation continuum, including outpatient providers like Ivy Health.
When Ivy joined the network, the partnership created opportunities to collaborate with other health systems and with scholars participating in LeaRRn’s Learning Health Systems Scholar Program.
Asking Better Questions with Real-World Data
One of the advantages of a large therapy network is perspective.
Every patient experience is individual, but when outcomes are looked at across a broader population, patterns begin to emerge. Those patterns can help clinicians and researchers ask more meaningful questions about what contributes to better outcomes, where care can improve, and how new approaches perform outside of a tightly controlled research setting.
Ivy’s research priorities within LeaRRn reflected that breadth, including the impact of residency-trained clinicians, the use of advanced analytics and machine learning, digital health technologies, PT-first care models, and quality-improvement efforts focused on patient outcomes and operational effectiveness across adult and pediatric therapy.
Those are not abstract research questions. They connect directly to decisions clinicians and healthcare organizations make every day.
Research That Comes Back to the Clinic
For Ivy, research has never been useful simply because it produces another data point. The value comes when what we learn can help clinicians make better decisions, improve the patient experience, or help more people get the right care at the right time.
That was the point Dr. Tim Marshall, then Ivy’s director of clinical outcomes and research, emphasized when the LeaRRn partnership was announced: collaboration could help Ivy advance both research and clinical practice so patients and families ultimately benefit.
That connection between evidence and everyday care remains central to Ivy’s approach to clinical excellence. Outcomes measurement, research, analytics, specialty training, and clinician development all give us different ways to ask the same basic question: What can we learn that helps us take better care of people?
Learning Is Part of the Work
The original LeaRRn initiative created a national community around learning health systems research in rehabilitation. Today, Brown University maintains LeaRRn’s research resources, archived events, and applied learning cases as a resource for the field.
For Ivy, the 2022 partnership represents an important step in a broader journey toward becoming a more data-informed, research-minded therapy organization.
Clinical excellence is not just about having expertise. It’s also about being willing to study what we do, learn from the results, and keep asking how care can work better.
Because when a health system learns, patients should feel the benefit.