By Daniel Stein and Paul Wormeli There are countless ways to demonstrate the horror of our nation’s opioid crisis, from raw numbers (over 47,600 opioid-related deaths in 2017) to records set (fatal overdoses now exceed vehicular deaths) to OMG descriptions of the drugs’ toxicity. A couple of recent examples: During a routine traffic stop last […]
Category: Health
It’s Time to Bring All the Players to the Table to Better-Address the Opioid Crisis
Bill Hazel is Senior Advisor for Strategic Initiatives and Policy at George Mason University in Virginia. He is the state’s former Secretary of Health and Human Resources, and serves on the Board of Directors of the Stewards of Change Institute For as many decades as I’ve been a conscious adult – which is quite a […]
Data-Informed Investments + Cross-Sector Systems = Greater Savings and Better Health
As most Americans look forward to the bounty of Thanksgiving next week, too many children and families in our country face a problem they must deal with all year round: hunger. And while the pain associated with hunger in this country pulls at our heart and soul, it is also hitting us in the wallet. […]
Learning from 9/11: A New Approach to Fighting the Opioid Crisis
One of the major problems exposed by the tragedy on 9/11 was the inability of government agencies to reach across their silos to share critical information and to coordinate their efforts. To address that potential risk to U.S. national security, Congress voted to establish the Information Sharing Environment, the responsibility of which is to promote […]
SOCI’s 12th Symposium: We’re All in This Together
Given the times we live in, it would be easy for someone to read the first half of the title of Stewards of Change Institute’s 12th Annual National Symposium – “Taking Action During Disruptive Times: Advancing Progress on Innovation, Interoperability and Technology in HHS” – and think there’s a political judgement lurking behind the words. It […]
Taking Action During Disruptive Times: Two Exciting New SOCI Projects
(With Thanks to Kresge Foundation and Health Information and Management Systems Society) Wherever any of us may fall on the political spectrum, most professionals working to improve the health and well-being of people in our country can probably agree on this: It’s hard to predict how the disparate pieces of the healthcare puzzle will come […]
A Big Idea – and an Ambitious Approach – for Addressing Major Health Crises
Well, I finally figured out the definition of “huge.” No, I’m not referring in any way to the word as used by the new administration in Washington. Rather, I’m talking about an event at which I had the privilege to speak earlier this month in Orlando, where over 42,000 attendees (yes, you read that right) […]
Spreading the Word on the Impact of Interoperability and Open Data: Our Latest Symposium Focused Sharply on Improving Children’s Lives
Over the past decade, the steadily escalating use of open data has expanded knowledge, driven innovation, enhanced effectiveness and improved outcomes in a growing number of realms, particularly relating to health, healthcare and human services. Stewards of Change Institute, seeing the opportunity (and the need) to expand this work even further, recently held an event […]
Are we at the point of a fundamental change in the role of IT in Human Services?
I’ve been working now for some 27 years in Human Services in -roles mostly related to the advanced use of IT by the business. I was there through client server mainframe replacement in the early 90’s, business intelligence in the late 90’s, the Internet in the 00’s, composite applications and SOA in the late 00’s […]