St.
Cloud
ST CLOUD (public) NCI/COLT FHCRC LH
St. Cloud Projects
We're known for our special contribution in connecting people and endeavors across disciplines for fruitful dialogue and collaborations. Malcolm Gladwell's "The Tipping Point" (2000) discusses the significance of connectors as catalysts for change. In personal and insightful ways, St. Cloud provides powerful connections among thought leaders who are committed to the unfolding promise of technology in health.
To those connections, we bring perspectives based on twenty plus years of experience in activities, such as:
- providing strategic counsel in cross-sector adaptations of technologies to commercial technology conferences
- providing strategic counsel in cancer communication technologies and budget initiatives for research and public information programs at regional and national levels (National Cancer Institute, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center),
- leading regional programs in public health information with an 800 call center, state and regional agency support for outreach, and research,
- conducting scientific research in cancer communications (co-investigator on 2 grants),
- advising national committees in technology and health for federal agencies (National Cancer Institute/NIH, Department of Health and Human Services) and non-profits (Robert Wood Johnson, Jonas Salk Foundation, IEEE, Council for the Individual and Technology - Roundtable, eHealth Institute).
This work builds on our involvement in the healthcare technology initiatives of the early 1990's to bridge public and private sector understandings. We remain intrigued by issues raised during Jean's graduate thesis survey “Technology Features of a Public Health Internet Collaboratory: Acknowledging Stakeholder Diversity and Public/Private Roles in Complex Global Systems”). We see the mission and values of the eHealth Institute and its annual Summit invitational conferences for government, academic, non-profit, and commercial leaders as furthering this work. (Jean is a founding Board member.)
While the eHealth Institute focuses on near term issues, St. Cloud also works on mid- to long-range business time horizons with leaders who are grappling with how technology will and should affect healthcare. Our focus is identifying key points of leverage where health benefits can be realized on individual and population levels. We use environmental scans of bellwether industries, looking for consumer expectations, and technology trends and applications in areas such as aviation, law, and personal finance that can be adapted for health. We have written about this in, "Our Wealth, Our Health", published in 2002, and in "“Digital Literacy in a Landscape of Data: A Plea for a Broader Definition for Citizens and Patients”, published in 2006.
As we move into 2007, we'll be looking to add value to discussions of genomics and bioinformatics, trans-disciplinary research, and e-learning. We're fascinated by opportunities to help the general public increase their science and health literacy and awareness through visualization of information, and various design disciplines.
We feel that the prospectus described by the MIT Media Lab's Health Special Interest Group is still a fairly reasonable view of how healthcare will unfold:
"Nanotechnology, biosensors, body networks and smart homes are combining to give consumers the tools to take control of their health and maintain their lifestyle. This emerging network of technologies can also help create a web of interpersonal relationships that reinforce healthy behaviors and medical compliance. The detailed, continuous and individual data from such a network is synergistic with advances in both human genome and conventional medical research, and offers the potential for creation of a data-rich, personalized, and preventative medical science."