Welcome to Health and Health Care 2020

Thanks for visiting the Health and Health Care 2020 site! The Institute for the Future has developed this site to track ongoing developments in the future of health and health care--interesting developments, innovative players, intriguing questions--that will affect the long-term future of health and health care in the United States, and we'd like your help. I'd like to take a minute to help you navigate around the site and let you know a bit more about what you'll find here and how you can get involved.

Getting Started
Watch the four alternative futures scenario videos--You can find them from the homepage or by going to the individual pages for growth, discipline, collapse, and transformation. These four videos offer distinct, internally consistent and plausible take on what health and health care might look like in 2020.

Share Your Thoughts
Do you see evidence supporting these futures out there? A contradictory point? Maybe you and your colleagues are working to make one of these futures happen--or to avoid them? You can speak your mind at any of the scenario video pages. You'll need to register first to do this--look for the link in the top right corner.

Blog
We'll be using this part of the site to share some of the signals we're seeing in our research that point toward one direction of change or another. I'll also be highlighting some of your thoughts and comments on this blog and will use this space to make site announcements.

More About the HC 2020 Project
You can read a longer explanation of the HC2020 project here, but here's the quick version. We've developed these scenario videos as part of a year-long research < ahref="http://www.iftf.org/node/2710">project examining the long-term future of health and health care in the U.S. These four stories are designed to push us out of our traditional models and instead encourage us to examine a broader set of possibilities. In looking at these four corners of possibility, we can identify threats, opportunities, challenges and responses that are less readily apparent and begin to act today to prepare for these threats and opportunities. We encourage you to not play favorites: Consider these futures as constructed and use them to think through the possibilities of what may happen in the coming decade.

Thanks again for visiting. Poke around, watch the videos. I'll be updating this space from time to time for the next few months. And if you have any thoughts, comments, or questions, don't hesitate to contact us here.