Sneak Peek: Healthcare in 2020
This week I got to attend the Institute for the Future (IFTF)’s Health Horizons 
Conference in San Jose. Kathi Vian invited me to join her wonderful panel on Building the Health Commons, along with Tori Tuncan of Lend4Health and Dr. Kelly Travers of MD Health Evolution. My slides on “Patient-generated data” are below, although I’m not sure they stand alone without me talking through them.
The trends and forecasts presented by IFTF for what healthcare will look like in 2020 were striking, inspiring, and cautionary. 100 people from all manner of health-focused organizations were there, sharing ideas and brainstorming “if only…” scenarios in Open Space sessions.
2020 Forecasts
Since the meeting was for IFTF clients, I’m not allowed to get into too many details, but I can talk about general trends. The most interesting trends for me had to do with the increasing role of commons in healthcare, the seamless and ubiquitous presence of sensors and health-related technology, and the challenges of making information actionable.
Video scenarios were presented for both positive and negative possible futures. Ted Eytan did a very cool presentation on kp.org, which has demonstrated amazing adoption. Bob Johansen talked about Ten New Leadership Skills for an Uncertain World. And around the room, I heard a lot of talk about Diabetes in particular, and incentives in general for how to encourage people to make positive changes for their health.
Quantified Selves
In the “if only we were all quantified selves…” open space session I led, people asked a lot of questions about what to track and what can be learned from tracking. The conversation wandered from epigenetics and Bayesian statistics to garbology (studying people’s garbage to see if they’re tracking truthfully) and gratitude.
One thing that surprised me was a question about how to track “being present” and how to measure the effect of “giving” behavior in your life. Applying quantitative principles to qualitative or spiritual behaviors and states would be an interesting study. Someone also suggested having the Quantified Self group agree to a collective experiment where we all track a particular thing for a defined period of time and compare our results – great idea!
We talked about what would happen if everyone had their genetic, health, and lifestyle data pooled together in a big open commons. While the challenges would be privacy, security, and effective analysis, the potential is to cure disease, understand behavior, and effect positive change for individual and collective health.
Now that’s an exciting future.
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June 24th, 2009 at 7:24 am
Thanks for the great post and references, Alexandra!
I’d love to track being present, giving behavior and gratitude. Sometimes at the end of the day I simply reflect on how much time I spent in positive mental states vs. negative and endeavor to spend more time in a wider range of positive states, and seek the intent or message behind the negative states. It would be nice to have an auto-tracker for this, and the 000s of other things that I’d like to auto-track.
I think the notion and protection of the commons is crucial to getting around the HIPAA-strangled traditional health care industry and truly enabling personalized medicine.