Thinkin' about the future

Courtesy of Engineers without Fears, I found Katie Chatfield's visualisations of a talk by Bruce Sterling.


The talk is good (though quite long). However, I think the visualisations do more than convey the talk, and can be looked at quite quickly. Favela chic does not really appeal, I'm afraid. (Actually, the latter part of the Bruce Sterling talk had some very interesting insight and advice about what we should do as individuals, but this did not relate to 'where did the future go?')

Courtesy of Tony Collins, I read a piece on NHS IT's local future. The whole piece is good, but this extract shows that there are some signs that the wider context of use is starting to be recognised.

...The Tories made headlines recently by proposing personal health records - allowing patients easily to access, alter and control information about their own health on the internet.

Integrating a user-friendly interface with the rest of the NHS, as suggested by their name-checking of Microsoft and Google as potential providers, is likely to be some way off.

But many in health IT are convinced a solution must be found to enable the level of preventive and self care required to balance the NHS books in coming years.

Great Ormond Street’s work with children with rare and complex long term conditions often requires many parties, from families to a large range of health and social care professionals, to be kept informed.

David Bowen [of Great Ormond Street] says it had spent a long time looking for technology to aid the process but had found little inspiration within the NHS, and in the end turned to other sectors.

It is hoping systems such as corporate social networks will allow a set of authorised individuals to quickly contribute to and share information about a patient.

He says: “The implications of this are terrific. If we are going to afford healthcare in the future then patients and families have to do a lot for themselves.”

We know from Drucker that the customer is the place to start organisational change.

The Cognitive Edge community has a number of people involved in health care, because it has to change on funding grounds.