HealthMedia, Inc
September 1999
After years of teaching and researching health behavior, Vic Strecher was increasingly frustrated by the archaic tools available to him and his colleagues for public health promotion. "Why should I be creating material that I personally would never look at?" he asked himself.
Then the emergence of desktop publishing and mail-merge technologies made it possible "to reach the masses but offer micro-tailored customized information" in the form of individualized publications called Personal Wellness Guides, he says. When the data showed that such information actually caused changes in lifestyle behavior, which accounts for 50% of the morbidity in the United States, it became clear that such techniques could dramatically reduce the country's health care bill.
Strecher is professor of health behavior and health education in the University of Michigan School of Public Health, professor of health behavior in the UM School of Medicine, and director of cancer prevention and control, and the Health Media Research Center, at the UM's Comprehensive Cancer Center.
He's also a budding entrepreneur, thanks in part to his links with the UM's Office of Technology Transfer. The customized guides have attracted the attention of health maintenance organizations and large companies seeking to reduce employee medical costs. Strecher's lab has also produced about 100 interactive computer kiosks, called Health'o'Vision, and located them in public, high-traffic areas around the state of Michigan. Users can access various channels of information (children's bicycle safety, breast cancer, etc.) and even personalize guides for themselves.
Requests for the kiosk program, the computer-tailored guides, and other intervention tools-all basically still prototypes-began pouring in. "We couldn't really fulfill them," says Strecher. "We were a research laboratory, not a business. We realized that to move from the prototype stage to the real stage is the same type of event that has to occur in moving from a concept car to a real car that's mass-produced. Distribution is important, sales and marketing are important, and none of that is relevant to a university objective. Hence, the business."
Called HealthMedia, Inc. (HMI), it was launched in the summer of 1998. "Many of the things we're building in the lab will be licensed out to the company," Strecher says. "HMI will be shrink-wrapping these intervention tools, so to speak. If we go about this right, we can use information age technologies to improve a large percentage of the public's health."
He credits the OTT for "tremendous help in planning, developing and building the business," which he deems an appropriate vehicle for reaching socially desirable goals. "My objective in this is to try to improve the public health," says Strecher. "There are a lot of ways to do that. One is conducting good research. Another is to take that research and disseminate it to the marketplace."
Printed from: http://www.techtransfer.umich.edu/news_events/success_stories/story_7.php