Sciana appoints Bogi Eliasen as co-chair for 2020 cohort 4

Eliasen will attend and co-lead all four meetings alongside Ilona Kickbusch

Bogi Eliasen, Director of Health, Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies, will serve as co-chair for Sciana’s 2020 cohort 4.

Eliasen will help shape Sciana’s evolving long-term strategy, network development, communication  and visibility alongside foundation partners, senior ambassadors, and chair Ilona Kickbusch.

He will also attend and co-lead all four meetings of the 2020 cohort at Salzburg Global Seminar in Salzburg, Austria.

Eliasen said, “I accepted the role because I am very impressed by the set-up and vision of Sciana. We are entering a new health paradigm that will demand an understanding of high complexity and adaptive skills from decision makers to form that paradigm for the betterment of societies.

“Sciana is a cross border approach, providing insights, knowledge, and a network among the leaders and decision-makers of the future of health. They will need the skills to work across boundaries of countries, cultures, sectors, and scientific disciplines. The world needs this approach.

“It is an honour for me to have the opportunity to co-chair an amazing set-up with one of the strongest health leaders, Ilona Kickbusch.”

In his role, Eliasen will help implement the Delphi method. Eliasen said, “As a part of an ongoing dialog between the members of cohort 4, we will use a real-time Delphi method on a very user-friendly platform where we can have running polls and real-time discussion to qualify challenges and aspects of topics we work with between the meetings.

“It can be used as a tool to build consensus on the challenges we are trying to solve and also to write opinion pieces the cohort might want to express on relevant matters that are ongoing in health.

“At the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies we work with the online real-time Delphi method, which is an advanced form of the Delphi method. The real-time fashion of the Delphi allows participants to monitor the panels overall opinion and shifting consensus, as well as any comments and argumentation made by other participants in real-time.”

Eliasen will introduce  the use of this method to complement the existing Sciana Challenge members will create. The 2020 Sciana Challenge will be identified by cohort 4 to define the new frontiers of health. The cohort will work on this leadership challenge for two years to explore game changing leadership practices that will enable them to make a difference.

Ilona Kickbusch, chair of the Sciana Network, said, “I am thrilled that Bogi Eliasen accepted our invitation to co-chair the 2020 cohort. It will allow us to introduce new concepts to take the Sciana Challenge forward as we want to innovate continuously.”

Eliasen is already familiar with the Sciana Network. In 2019, he spoke at the fourth and final meeting of the second cohort. His expertise lies in combining various fields of knowledge, and his areas of focus include health, medicine, genetics, genomics, and public policy.

In 2019, he received the HIMSS Global Achievement Award for his work bridging digital health and genomics in the context of the future of personalized health. In 2009, he helped initiate the FarGen project on the Faroe Islands, which aimed to achieve whole genome sequencing of the Islands’ entire population to research and develop opportunities in genetics.