Health and Health Care 2010: The Forecast, The Challenge
Health and Health Care 2010: The Forecast, The Challenge (2nd Edition) [SR-794]
To recognize the 25th anniversary of its founding, in 1997 The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation asked the Institute for the Future (IFTF) to forecast the future of health and health care in America for the period between 2000 and the year 2010. This is the Second Edition of that Forecast, revised and updated to reflect the changes that have occurred since our initial work in 1997–1998. As we originally stated, the purpose of this forecast is to provide the reader with a description of critical factors that will influence health and health care in the first decade of the 21st century.
In this book, we have singled out the trends most likely to influence the course of Americans’ health and the state of the American health care delivery system in the next decade. The drivers of this system are relatively stable and predictable from now to 2005. Beyond 2005, and through to 2010 and beyond, the future of health and health care is much more volatile.
To cope with the uncertainties that exist in these later years, IFTF has created three different scenarios that describe emerging visions of health care in this country. They are titled Stormy Weather, The Long and Winding Road, and The Sunny Side of the Street, and they are described in the first chapter of this report and depicted in the map that is bound to the inside of the back cover.
We hope that the findings of this study will be of value to community service organizations, hospitals, providers, payers, and researchers in the long-term planning processes that support their own visions of the future.
Publication Date
January 2003