It’s not all about science

Bill Snyder
Published: January, 2009

Bill Stead, M.D., leads a discussion in the Vanderbilt Innovation Center. The “scribing” on the white board was drawn by the center’s production manager, Kelly Adams.

Photo by Joe Howell

As director of Vanderbilt Medical Center’s Informatics Center , he’s in charge of managing an information technology infrastructure that supports Vanderbilt’s patient care, research and educational programs.

As chairman of the Vanderbilt Center for Better Health , he also oversees efforts designed to help transform the nation’s health care system and accelerate improvements in health care outcomes.

But although he describes himself as an optimist, Stead worries that the United States is “drifting towards … a whole series of national-scale crises,” not only in health care, but in education, infrastructure, energy and the environment.

“We’ve now had a decade of one bubble after another,” he explains. “We’re getting people who are experts at making money out of chaos … (but) I think as a society we’ve really lost our ability to do anything important.

“We did take on high performance computing as a challenge a number of years ago. We did take on the human genome. (But) I’m not aware that we’ve done anything since then that has been taken on as a national grand challenge.

“It’s not all about science. I believe it’s a much broader cultural problem.

“We should each feel responsible for the fact that (last fall) our children (were) sitting in gas lines a generation after we did. And we’ve done nothing about it.”

In health care, “historically we’ve been superb in discovering new things,” Stead continues. Yet Vanderbilt, for example, is located in a state that has among the nation’s worst health indicators in such areas as obesity, diabetes and low birth weight.

“Producing the best science and providing the best service isn’t enough,” he argues. “How do we actually get the benefit in terms of health in society? What is the transformative model that generates a major difference in results?”