An Upside Down Future for Healthcare

BY KIM BELLARD I find myself thinking about the future a lot, in part because I’ve somehow accumulated so much past, and in part because thinking about the present usually depresses me.  I’m not so sure the future is going to be better, but I still have hopes that it can be better.   Two articles recently provided some good insights into how to think about the future: Kevin Kelly’s How to Future and an except from Jane McGonigal’s new book Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today that was published in Fast Company. I’ll briefly summarize each and then try to apply them to healthcare. —————– Mr. Kelly – a founding Executive Editor of Wired (and now “Senior Maverick” there), editor/ publisher of Cool Tools – posits that futurists need to look at the past, present, and future.  “They look carefully at the past because most of what will happen tomorrow is already happening today,” he notes.  “The past is the bulk of our lives, and it will be the bulk in the future.”   As for the present:  It is often said that most futurists are really predicting the present. It turns out that the present is very hard to see…So a good futurist spends a lot of time trying to decipher the present and to try to see it through the mask of present-day biases…I sometimes think of “seeing the present” as trying o...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Health Policy Public Health Futurists health futurist Healthcare Source Type: blogs