Trying to forecast the future of global healthcare is an ambitious undertaking, to say the least. Even trying to discuss the future of health insurance leads to heated debate and disagreement, as we've seen over the past few months. Not to be deterred, the team at Ergonomidesign took on this task, and created a short video outlining their vision of an Integrated Health Care Ecosystem.
The good news for our readers is that in this future scenario there seems to be plenty of work for product and interaction designers, in addition to actual healthcare professionals.
After over 40 years of pioneering work in the Life Science industry, we have been working for the past months to put together our take on the future of Life Science. Our story comprises not only scenarios and a clear picture of the eco-system in which Life Science might exist (in 2015) - but we have gone as far as prototyping glimpses of how interaction might occur with doctors and other medical professionals and services. The future concept and prototype was developed by the Life Science team at Ergonomidesign including user experience and interaction designers, design strategists, graphic designers, developers and health care professionals. Our challenge was to envision the future of Life Science and develop possible solutions for the world to test, use and reflect on.
The future of Health Care is a subject that has aroused intense speculation recently across different forums. Several interesting scenarios and points of view have been discussed. Professionals and designers alike have tried to make sense of a fuzzy future. Predicting possible futures for the Health Care industry is an ambitious task, fraught with great risk. There are far too many disparities in various global Healthcare Systems today that make it impossible to present one comprehensive solution that fits all. The industry is constantly affected by Government legislation, making their rate of development impossible to predict in isolation from external factors. Most importantly, Health Care is about us - ordinary people - for whom tailoring one universal solution is out of question.
Often the best way to predict the future is by attempting to design and build critical glimpses of it. Storytelling has usually been the most favored approach - usually giving rise to compelling and believable scenarios. The approach taken by us at Ergonomidesign was to bring in elements of prototyping at crucial moments in the scenario, in order to demonstrate key interactions actually taking place. Right or wrong is always subject to debate - a process of endless iteration.
