Guest post from 2nd LHS Summit Collaborator, Josh Rubin

I'm pleased to partner with Josh as co-director of the Second LHS Summit Planning Committee. - HB
Realizing the LHS vision is a sociotechnical challenge: it is as much a challenge relating to people and policy as it is a technical one. It's about galvanizing a profound paradigm and culture shift in how healthcare and health are done. The Second Summit offers the Learning Health Community a venue to prioritize its work overall and to refine a prototype for collaborative testing of a single aspect of a data-sharing framework for large-scale, cross-sector governance. It creates opportunities to advance all of the pieces of the multi-faceted puzzle beyond meaningful use and adoption and interoperability that are needed to collaboratively (and disruptively) transform health.

The Second Summit will build upon work of the Learning Health Community of the past several years. That work includes two grassroots multi-stakeholder initiatives: mobilizing diverse stakeholders to collaboratively develop frameworks to address LHS policy and governance issues as well as Essential Standards/Structures to Enable Learning (ESTEL). More generally, as a catalyzing force spreading the urgency and the vision to mobilize and empower multiple and diverse stakeholders to work together to realize the nationwide (and ultimately global) LHS none of us can realize alone, the Learning Health Community will seize upon this Second Summit as an opportunity for all of us to make pledges to ourselves and to one another to engage in action to rapidly advance this transformative vision.

If the LHS Core Values are in a sense a Declaration of Independence -- catalyzing the start of a movement (building upon the work and thought of so many others including the Institute of Medicine and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT) -- then the Declaration of Interdependence issued from the Second Learning Health System Summit will be a concrete commitment to action. A commitment from stakeholders to drive this collaborative effort forward in leaps and bounds. Though there is broad agreement that realizing the LHS is in some ways more challenging than the moonshot, the Declaration of Interdependence can nonetheless be one small step for the stakeholders involved, but one giant leap for the LHS movement (and for human health).