The revolutions in life sciences and information and communication technologies are leading to interesting discoveries that could prove consequential to individual and population health. Innovations and discoveries stemming from the investments in science and technology have begun to influence practices across the entire illness to well-being continuum and have the potential to revolutionize how we treat diseases and promote health. Yet, two major challenges could derail the impact of these developments:
- The benefits from these revolutions continue to accrue unequally across social groups exacerbating existing inequities in health and well-being.
- The translation of innovations to advance the science, policy and practice to improve patient and population health remains a major problem.
Addressing these problems requires a multi-disciplinary, multi-level and a multi-sectoral approach entailing coordination, planning, organization and execution at many levels. It also requires a framework that takes the issue of inequities explicitly into account and that strives to design and execute solutions at scale. In this Health IDEAS talk, Dr. Viswanath will characterize the problems of communication inequalities and knowledge translation and show how they can be addressed, drawing on exemplar efforts from his lab as well as in the field.
This seminar, held in partnership with the Department of Communication, is the first of the academic year in the IHSI Health IDEAS lecture series. Health IDEAS (clinical Innovation, Discovery, Engineering and Applied Science) will help ignite new interdisciplinary research ideas and collaborations. This lecture series will engage health sciences researchers, faculty, and students from various units as well as clinical partners with the ultimate goal of inspiring new innovations in health.
