Institute For The Future

Designing the future of health care . . . or is it really about designing the future of health?

At IFTF, the Health Horizons Program is spending time looking at the latter and considering how design thinking may apply to the future of health.  "Design thinking" is an emerging trend that focuses on developing innovative responses to business challenges.  It is a cross-disciplinary approach that combines "creative confidence and analytic ability," according to David Kelly, founder of Stanford's d.school and the design firm IDEO.

I wish I could have been a fly on the wall at last month's Aspen Design Summit.  This working meeting brought together a select group of 60 designers, change leaders, NGOs, foundations and experts to demonstrate how collective action, collaboration, and the power of design can be used to address large social problems.  I had read about it on sponsor Winterhouse Institute's website, as well as on co-sponsor AIGA's site, and knew one of the projects had a connection to health care; another had a public health mandate.

A few days ago, Helen Walters, BusinessWeek's editor for Innovation and Design, posted a story about her experience at the Summit.  The assembled group had been divided into teams, and she found herself on the Mayo Clinic team, which was tasked with developing an initiative around rural health care delivery systems to broaden their impact, efficiency, and reach.  A couple of representatives from the Clinic's pioneering Center for Innovation and its SPARC Laboratory were there to explain the need to design a new health care system for Austin, Minn. (population 24,000).  Walters reports that "Previous Mayo Clinic research had shown that the city's health-care system was inadequate and fragmented, a situation common in rural communities around the U.S."

After spending several days discussing a variety of factors—from health care reform to what everyday life is like in Austin—the group determined that it needed to "avoid thinking about health care in terms of traditional services, such as emergency room visits, and think instead about ideas of wellness and community" (my emphasis).  This realization is what resonated for me the most in Walters' article.

As the Health Horizons Program moves forward with its research agenda for 2010, we will be focusing on one of the key challenge areas we identified as part of our HC2020 work—the need to transform bodies and lifestyles.  We have been following the role of community and connectedness in creating and maintaining health and well-being, and will continue to do so in the coming year.  And we will also be considering what designing health will look like over the next ten years.  Stay tuned!