PSFK’s Future of Health Report

You may have seen this elsewhere online, since it’s been making the rounds, but PSFK (friends of Murketing, I should mention) recently put out a rather massive report full of ideas relating to the future of health care. It takes me days to get through documents like this — more than 200 pages of ideas and concepts, from PSFK itself as well as a battery of agencies they asked to contribute. But I’m always happy to see the various smart people in the trend/marketing/design worlds putting the minds to a problem bigger than, you know, how to sell more stuff. And I have a particular interest in health care being improved by technology and design and so on, both here in the U.S., and in the world’s underdeveloped regions where the problems remain shockingly acute.

One of the dominant problems in both scenarios, I think it’s safe to say, is communication with professionals, so I was pleased to see that listed near the top of the “Challenges” list: “Limited ability to contact physicians and health workers when necessary.” Lots of proposed improvements on that front involve the marriage of mobile technology with the Internet.

The report names ten challenges in all, and the concepts range from self-monitoring ideas to practical design suggestions. Check out the whole thing here. PSFK has also been doling out highlights on its site.

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