Institute For The Future

Four Forecast Perspectives on Reworking Health

In recent years, traditional health care players have begun expanding their reach outside of health care settings and into our homes and workplaces, while new players have ventured into health domains. As this process accelerates over the next decade, it will reshape the roles of patients, consumers, providers, and caregivers, and create the conditions from which new authorities and ways to engage people in making decisions will emerge.

In our 2013 health research, Reworking Health: New Authorities in a Well-Being Economy, we explored the new tools and resources that are challenging traditional roles of patients, consumers and providers and empowering new authorities to emerge and engage people in their health.

As part of this work, we created a set of four forecast perspectives with companion Artifacts from the Future that depict how four critical skills—measurement, empathy, cooperation, and design—will be applied by traditional and emerging stakeholders to improve health and well-being over the next decade. From black market services to mitigate the effects of personal indulgences to microwork services for mental health, the artifacts depict the broad range of ways that health management will happen over the next decade.

Over the next several weeks, we'll be releasing these perspectives and their accompanying artifacts, starting today with Measurement: The Creative Search for Metrics that Matter (PDF) and featuring the Artifact from the Future, Patient Sense.

Below are brief descriptions of each perspective:

MEASUREMENT: The Creative Search for Metrics that Matte (PDF)
This forecast perspective argues that as we move into an era of abundant data, we will see a proliferation of creative ways to identify the hidden, and often surprising, metrics that matter to health.

EMPATHY: The Rise of Technologies to Expand Emotional Connections (PDF)
This forecast perspective explores how technological innovations that monitor emotional states will create new tools to help providers and caregivers connect emotionally during health interactions.

COOPERATION: Transcending Traditional Boundaries (PDF)
This forecast perspective explores how cooperation will break down traditional boundaries, transform the scale of health interventions, and create new commons-based approaches to creating health.

DESIGN: The Personalization of Health Design (PDF)
This forecast perspective argues that approaches to health design will move from broad scale attempts at universal design toward increasingly personalized and flexible approaches to meeting individual needs.

For more about Reworking Health or IFTF's health research, contact:

• Dawn Alva at [email protected] or 650-233-9585