Joseph Leiter NLM/MLA Lectureship 2018

The Joseph Leiter NLM/MLA Lectureship was established in 1983 to stimulate intellectual liaison between the Medical Library Association (MLA) and the National Library of Medicine (NLM. The lectureship is hosted at NLM every other year.

As director of All of Us, Eric Dishman leads the agency’s efforts to build a national research program of 1 million or more US participants to advance precision medicine. Previously, he was an Intel fellow and vice president of the Health and Life Sciences Group at Intel Corporation, where he was responsible for driving global strategy, research and development, product and platform development, and policy initiatives for health and life science solutions. His organization focused on growth opportunities for Intel in health information technology, genomics and personalized medicine, consumer wellness, and care coordination technologies.

Mr. Dishman will discuss the challenges and strategies around:

•Meeting communities where they are (understanding their needs, concerns around research, meeting their literacy levels, etc.)

•Widening the definition of precision health and conveying the fact that All of Us is more than a genomics program.

•Ethics and logistics of targeting with marketing analytics.

•Balancing the promise, with the hype and vision, with the need for patience.

Dishman is widely recognized as a global leader in health care innovation with specific expertise in home and community-based technologies and services for chronic disease management and independent living. Trained as a social scientist, he is known for pioneering innovation techniques that incorporate anthropology, ethnography, and other social science methods into the development of new technologies.

He also brings a unique personal perspective, as a cancer patient for 23 years—finally cured thanks to precision medicine—to drive a person-centric view of health care transformation.

“Eric Dishman is the perfect speaker at the perfect time,” noted NLM Director Patricia Flatley Brennan, RN, PhD. “His message about the power of people to advance scientific discovery is a strong one. Also, as was announced last year, NIH’s All of Us Research Program and NLM are teaming up to raise awareness about this landmark effort to advance precision medicine. As our colleagues at the Medical Library Association know so well,” she continued, “libraries serve as vital community hubs. NLM’s collaboration with All of Us presents a perfect opportunity to help the public understand how health research impacts all of us. By pairing our National Network of Libraries of Medicine members with public libraries to reach local communities, we hope to contribute to medical breakthroughs that may lead to more tailored disease prevention and treatment solutions for generations to come.”