Patients, Drugs, and Technology: Thinking about the future of healthcare
As the world of healthcare is constantly shaped and evolved by emerging technologies, systems and processes, and the very environment that surrounds us all, it begs the question: Who does the future of healthcare belong to?
Will healthcare be aptly designed and iterated upon to improve our lives? Will big Tech and Big Pharma find new ways to collect and exploit personal data for profit? These questions and more are why the Watson Health team sought out members of IBM’s Strategic Foresight Guild to explore possible answers while beginning to imagine potentially delightful or equally disturbing future scenarios that are on the horizon. By partnering with the Strategic Foresight Guild leads; Dan Silveira, Roosevelt Faulkner, and Meghan McGrath, the Watson Health team facilitated an internal 4-day workshop titled Vision Quest.
Day 1 — What’s trending
To begin the first day of the 4-day Vision Quest, the Watson Health team began by identifying signals, trends, and drivers that they observed in the health industry. This could be a new health monitoring app, diet trend, or even a new health system or process being adopted across the hospital system.
Key terms
- A signal is something that gives you insight or evidence of some future possibilities; they are indicators for trends already occurring or starting to emerge.
- A trend represents an existing or emergent pattern of behavior. Trends are made up of signals and show directional change over extended periods of time, usually no more than a decade. A trend can also be the accumulation of similar signals that are closely aligned in their growth and development.
- Drivers are forces that shape trends. As two futurists put it, drivers are “glaciers of the future world”, because of their slow, disruptive impact that shapes the landscape around them (Smith and Ashby, 2020). For example, understanding demographic changes that are to come (eg. baby boom) can set up a platform for considering the short and long-term effects of social, technological, economical, environmental, and political trends.
The team used a mixture of hunches, analyst predictions, current research, and personal experiences to guide their brainstorm of signals and trends. One observation that came up was the increased interest in experimenting with surgical robots, which suggests that we might be moving towards a future where surgeries may only be done by the steady, calculated hands of robotic arms. Such a trend could have a transformative, maybe even a disruptive, impact that is far-reaching into the system of care, affecting things like who or what gets trained to who or what provides the care.
Following the signals and trends brainstorming exercise, the team measured them to better understand their strength and importance with respect to the health industry.
Afterward, we mixed the high-impact trends to explore ways they could change shape and evolve over time to create new future trends and ideas. As a result, four areas of interest were identified — business, data, regulation, and people, which centered around one main question: How might we shift the power in health systems to people and communities?
Can you imagine your bathroom being a nexus between you, your primary care doctor, and your local pharmacy?
One promising starting point was looking at our own personal environment and devices for inspiration. Doing so led us to speculate how those things might change for better or for worse in light of emerging healthcare trends in the near future.
The speculative imagination evolved as people discussed topics about assistive robots, bio-hacking plants to create customized therapeutic medicines, and the home as a re-imagined space for health and data collection. Can you imagine your bathroom being a nexus between you, your primary care doctor, and your local pharmacy?
Day 2 — Here we go, yo, so what’s the scenario
The second day began by having the team select three trends to pursue from the previous day, which included:
- New business of care model that is built around patients understanding their power
- Disrupting power dynamics around the cost of healthcare
- Patient and community ownership
The goal for Day 2 was to come up with future scenarios based on these three trends. To do this, the team was instructed to brainstorm the impact of each trend using a Futures Wheel and STEEP framework.
For those who are unfamiliar, the Futures Wheel was first developed by futurist Jerome Glenn in 1971. It is a tool for mapping the potential direct and indirect consequences of any trend or event. The STEEP framework is used to evaluate external factors — social, technological, economical, environmental, and political- that impact design and business decisions. These simple yet thought-provoking tools can lead people to discover unattended consequences and implications that are both alarming and encouraging.
Once the activity began, the team’s imaginations ignited as they discussed the numerous potential consequences and relationships that could arise from each trend and how each STEEP lens could provide an alternate view of how those impacts may unfold. The list of themes they created laid the foundation for what later became the building blocks for speculative future stories.
“I feel like parts of my brain have been physically stretched”
Next, the team created speculative stories based on the outcomes and observations they uncovered from the Futures Wheel activity. For this section of the workshop, we used IBM’s Speculative Stories framework, which enables teams to create stories around a character, their values, their fictional world, and their unique challenges. In crafting such stories, teams can identify potential problems and think of novel ways to solve them.
Day 3 and Day 4 — I got a story to tell
Prototyping is a way of bringing futures to life, and one way to do that is through stories. Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby, authors of Speculative Everything, say:
Fictional nature requires viewers to suspend their disbelief and allow their imaginations to wander, to momentarily forget how things are now, and wonder about things could be.
Creating stories allows the audience to imagine potential worlds and the artifacts that exist within them.
Each team had one day to bring their story to life using whatever tools or medium they saw fit. On Day 4, teams presented their speculative stories through video or presentation.
As a result of this workshop, the Watson Health team built out several future versions of healthcare, which they used to talk critically about the nuances of what these changes could mean or even look like.
What experiences would users want in these worlds?
What might they want to avoid?
These strategic foresight frameworks and activities enable teams to think about a problem space and possible solutions beyond traditional design thinking methods. One participant said: “I feel like parts of my brain have been physically stretched,” after exploring the implications of one of these potential futures. By looking at a broad range of possibilities and aligning around the futures they wanted to begin building, this workshop empowered the Watson Health team to think through the choices they have the power to make today to help develop a future of healthcare that is both thoughtful, positive, and human-centered.
References:
Dunne, F., & Raby, A. (2015). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. MIT Press.
Smith, S., & Ashby, M. (2020). How to future: Leading and sense-making in an age of hyperchange. Kogan Page.
Roosevelt T. Faulkner is a User Researcher at IBM based in Austin, TX. Dan Silveira is a UX Designer / Strategist at IBM based in Ontario, Canada, and Meghan McGrath is a Design Strategy Lead at IBM based in Poughkeepsie, NY. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies or opinions.
