Healthcare Delivery Science Programs
What We Do
The Center for Healthcare Delivery Science's programs and activities are available to all clinical investigators, research staff and operational leaders at BIDMC. One of the Center’s highest priorities is building the research infrastructure and tools required to support the Center’s programs in each of the focus areas described below.
In addition, the Center brings together core faculty and senior advisors with deep expertise in healthcare delivery science, emerging research methods, biostatistics and epidemiology, and staff expertise in project management and data management. These faculty and staff experts serve as mentors to Innovation grant awardees and other junior investigators. The Center’s management of InSIGHT Core and the Machine Learning Core is an important part of this infrastructure.
Innovation Grants
The Innovation Grants Program is the Center’s signature initiative. By design, the program aims to identify and develop future innovators and create value for Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center patients and the healthcare delivery system. The program provides the opportunity for investigators and staff across BIDMC to design, implement and evaluate innovative projects that advance the Center’s goals of providing better quality, more equitable, high-value care to all of our patients.
The program was expanded in 2023 to include an opportunity for experienced machine learning researchers to use the Center’s Machine Learning Core to undertake a project not possible in their current computing environment. The Machine Learning Innovation Grant is designed to advance projects with a clear use case that are part of an established research program.
Our ability to offer opportunities and mentorship in these growing fields of research allows BIDMC to retain some of the most talented young clinical faculty while at the same time sustaining the culture of innovation that has differentiated BIDMC from many of its peer organizations.
Conferences
The Center convenes three conferences for Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center staff, trainees and clinicians from across the institution.
At the monthly Healthcare Delivery Science Grand Rounds, researchers and thought leaders in the field present ongoing works that may still have methodology questions but are well on the way to completion.
At the Center's Work in Progress sessions, established researchers and scientific advisors come together with fellows and junior faculty to discuss issues facing investigators and workshop early-stage ideas and methods on a monthly basis.
The Value Seminar Series is an interactive series designed to highlight clinical innovations at BIDMC, stimulate the consideration of value, sustainability, and scale and provide a forum to catalyze the spread of value-focused innovations across the Medical Center and BILH system.
More About Our Work
Machine learning has the potential to capitalize on the data-rich electronic health record to improve care by enabling risk predictions and insights. Our work focuses on using new data science methods to leverage this opportunity to help rather than hinder the bedside clinician; meaningfully inform and change care rather than repackaging information available in other ways; and address head-on embedded inequities in the care delivered to different groups of patients.
This work aims to promote health equity at BIDMC by facilitating action-oriented research focused on clinical operations and care delivery with broad applicability across specialties. As part of this effort, Center Director Jennifer Stevens convened a group with representation from key departments at BIDMC to identify needed infrastructure, tools for researchers, and criteria for evaluating health equity considerations in research projects and care delivery. The group's highest priority was to improve the accuracy of data collection critical to designing interventions. It achieved this objective by identifying critical gaps that exist in the areas of racial, ethnic and language data, which is a first step to ensuring that interventions can be successful.
Value has been defined as the measure of benefit to patients/cost. The Center's work advances the development and testing of innovative care models that seek to deliver high value, equitable, and patient-centered healthcare. This effort focuses on clinical operations and care delivery across all clinical departments and care settings.
