In virtually every state of our country, efforts are being mounted to combat the worst public health crisis in modern U.S. history; that is, the opioid epidemic. Some of these initiatives are still in their early stages, while others are relatively advanced and starting to see successes. Regardless of where they are in their development, […]
Category: Symposium
Not Just Another Symposium: Launching into the Future
Depending on which website you go to, you’ll learn that either President Abraham Lincoln or educator/ philosopher Philip Drucker came up with one of my favorite quotes: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” Regardless of who first spoke those wise words, they neatly encapsulate what Stewards of Change (SOC) has […]
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 […]
How can HHS benefit from the Digital Revolution?
We are well into the fourth industrial revolution – an era that provides a range of new technologies bringing together the physical, digital and biological worlds. It is a revolution that impacts digitization on the economy, providing emerging technology breakthroughs of artificial intelligence, robotics, the internet of things and autonomous vehicles, to name a few. […]
Moral Implications of Analytics and Cognitive Computing
As we look forward to the Stewards of Change symposium in a few weeks, I have been thinking about the challenges to using advanced analytics and cognitive computing to strengthen human services programs. Of course, I am not alone. Recently, academic and policy journals have published articles wrestling with the potential moral impact of predictive […]
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 […]
Our 11th National Symposium, the Opioid Epidemic . . . and an Opportunity for Progress
One of the big lessons learned in the aftermath of 9/11 was that the agencies, departments and even individual officials of government couldn’t operate optimally because, in simple terms, they were working in silos and therefore weren’t able to communicate with each other. In a commendable response to that reality, politicians mainly put aside their […]
Advancing Quickly at a Glacial Pace … and More Musings as Stewards’ 11th Annual Symposium Begins
The world in which Stewards of Change Institute operates – populated by concepts like information-sharing, interoperability, social determinants of health and, most recently, cognitive computing – is changing fast. I know that because I’ve watched the change happen, ever so slowly, for over a decade. Fast and slow simultaneously? Absolutely. The technology and much of […]
The Rising Opioid Abuse Epidemic
As the 11th annual Stewards of Change National Symposium is fast approaching, I have been pondering how states might be able to address one of the fastest growing and troubling outbreaks in this country: the rising opioid abuse epidemic. Simply reflect on this statistic. In 2014, there were one and a half times more drug […]