Does the “Future” of Health Care Matter?
by Fred Fortin
Kevin Kelly, the Senior Maverick at Wired magazine, writes that the future is less fashionable than it was 10 years ago. And it is especially so since the dot.com bust of 2001; the future, it seems, is far less “cool”.
During the industrial and digital revolutions, you needed to discern the future because that was were you were going to spend the rest of your life.
But then something weird happened in the first few years of this decade. The pace of change became so fast that it outpaced contemplation. The future became harder to predict, and exhausting to keep track of. With a long, colorful history of failed predictions, it occurred to almost everyone at once that very little of what we imagined our own futures to be would really happen. So why bother?
We in the US health care industry are very concerned about the future. We always have been. And we’ve spent considerable amounts of money on hiring professional help –scenario planners, futurists and other conjurers — to help us get our short and long term strategies in order. It’s no secret that things like hospitals, information systems, drug development, for example, take considerable amounts of time and money, and we all want to secure the future of those investments one way or another.
But the scale, risks and enormity of resources involved in health care should not blind us to the fact that the only thing we can count on for the future is the unexpected and the unpredictable. (See more here, here and here)
With the kinds of uncertainty we are now facing in US health care — 2008 elections, unsustainable costs and a growing politics of blame and greed — the future is less about, well, the “future” and more about the present, that is our ability to simply hang on for the ride. Both the pace and unpredictability of what now confronts us makes futurists look more like shamans trying to comfort a nervous patient, than professionals who can help us line up, in some understandable order, the drivers of change.
One thing is for sure, however, any official “futures”, at least for now, are DOA. And we don’t need to pay any futurist to tell us how that story will end since the the plot has still yet to be revealed. Stay tuned.
