Health and Wellness Futures
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Medical Tourism,
Telemedicine, and the Future of Global Health Care
This presentation explores the growing
trend toward the globalization of health care and medical
treatment, specifically through novel practices such as medical
tourism and telemedicine.
I first look at factors driving medical
tourism in the U.S. and elsewhere, such as lower cost and
superior treatment in offshore medical facilities. Americans can
save thousands of dollars by seeking treatments such as valve
replacement, liver transplants and hip replacement surgery in
fully-accredited hospitals located in Cyprus, Istanbul, the
Philippines, India, and South America. Moreover, many countries
offer advanced medical treatments not available in the U.S.
Medical schools and institutes in Chennai, India, for instance,
are engaged in intensive research in stem cell research,
nanotechnology, tissue engineering, gene therapy, and research
on curing diabetes. Predictably, American companies are
beginning to encourage their employees to travel to India and
other countries for medical procedures. To attract more medical
tourism some savvy countries are packaging sightseeing vacations
with medical travel trips. Price competition from global health
care is even beginning to drive down prices of medical treatment
in the U.S.
Breakthroughs in communications and cyber
technology, as well as telemedicine, will accelerate the
globalization of medicine. Soon, doctors and technicians will be
able to routinely operate on and diagnose injuries and diseases
of patients in distant locales.
Who should attend:
Members of the business community, educators, government policy
planners, futurists, academics, social scientists, and anyone
interested in learning about medical tourism and global health
care.
What you'll learn: This presentation will inform
attendees of the growing trend toward medical tourism and how it
will change the health care options open to citizens of any
country.
How can this new knowledge be applied: Attendees can
apply this information to their personal health care situation
and possibly consider options to their current health care. They
also might want to share this information with their
organizations' human resources departments and management.
Michael G. Zey,
professor, Montclair State University, Morristown, New Jersey
key words:
health care, medical tourism, longevity, telemedicine
issue areas: Health and Wellness Futures, Technology and
Science, Social and Cultural Trends
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Closing Plenary
Emerging Technologies in Health
Care and the Global Impact on
Society
Health care and health care technology are changing at an amazing
rate both in the U.S. and across the globe. Technology has altered the
way health care is delivered and the Internet and the media have been
instrumental in making consumers more and more knowledgeable about
health care. Increasingly these well-informed consumers believe that
they should be able to get the best value possible for every dollar
spent. The essential elements that are driving this change are
increased public demand for quality and service at a decreased cost,
the continued consolidation of the health care industry and the fact
that complex care requires greater resources. Another major factor
is the "flattening world" and the fact that the how, where, when and
why resources are allocated is emerging as a major critical issue
that will need to be addressed by everyone worldwide.
Information technology is and will continue to be a central
enabler that ties together the disparate functions of health care by
empowering consumers as active participants and decision makers in
their personal care process, and enhancing communication between and
among patients and providers.
This session will focus on the technologies that will help bring
about change in the way health care is delivered in the future.
Who should attend: Anyone interested in the impact of
technology on global health care.
What you’ll learn: Participants will: (1) Understand the major
environmental forces driving change in health care across the globe.
(2) Understand the global impact of these emerging technologies on
society. (3) Identify emerging IT and other major technologies and
their impact on health care.
How can this new knowledge be applied: Organizations,
businesses, and individuals can use this new information to plan for
their own health care and the impact these technologies will have
globally.
Molly J. Coye, founder and CEO, Health Technology Center;
former commissioner of Health for the State of New Jersey; director,
California Department of Health Services
Kevin M. Finckenscher, executive
vice president, International health care for Perot Systems;
formerly chief medical officer at WebMD Corporation, Plano, Texas
key words:
health care, education, technology, science
issue areas: Health and Wellness Futures, Technology and
Science
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Special Event
Is it Immoral to Seek to Be Immortal?: The Promise and Perils of Advances in
21st Century Biomedicine
Does the future hold medical advances that will allow us to live a longer,
higher quality life? And how will we cope with the moral challenges that success
in regenerative medicine, genetic engineering, genomics and nanobioengineering
will bring in their wake? The challenges to our social structures, modes of
family arrangement, economic health and ability to protect basic human rights
will prove enormous. Ironically the greatest source of ethical tension in the
future is likely to emerge from the success, not failure, of biomedicine and
applied biology. This speaker will both identify some of those challenges and
suggest ways in which they can and ought to be met.
Who should attend: Anyone interested in the challenges of medical
advances and their impact on our global future.
What you’ll learn: Participants will learn some of the challenges and
possible solutions medical advances will have on us.
How can this new knowledge be applied: This new knowledge can help
organizations, businesses, governments and individuals plan for the effects of
these medical advances.
Arthur Caplan, Emanuel and Robert Hart professor of bioethics; chair,
Department of Medical Ethics; director, Center for Bioethics, University of
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
key words: technology, biomedicine
issue areas: Health and Wellness Futures,
Technology and Science
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Health for All and A Health Care System Worth Creating
Exciting possibilities are on the horizon for health care—including
prevention or control of the major diseases. Yet the United States still spends
more to cover fewer people than any developed nation. Significant health
disparities, some of which are made worse by differences in health care, become
more apparent every
day. The 2008 Presidential election is igniting hope for
major health care reform. This session will consider the future of health care
and will demonstrate the Institute for Alternative Future’s (IAF) model for a
health care system worth creating.
In this presentation, the speakers
will be providing insights from their work on the future
of diabetes and obesity, cancer, health technology,
health professions, and primary care ,
and from IAF’s national project on reducing
disparities, the DRA Project, which has identified key opportunities to
simultaneously advance health and to reduce health disparities.
Who should attend: Government officials, businesspeople, planners and
individuals interested in health care and its costs ;
individuals concerned about
the future of their own health; and people interested in how the United States
can live up to an American Dream of fairness in health care and health outcomes.
What you’ll learn: Determinants of health;
major advances in health and
health care, including ones related to diabetes and cancer;
major advances that
could reduce health disparities,
e.g., focusing on the social and economic
determinants of health, improving healthy eating and active living;
and
health care
reform potentials in the United States as well as preferred health system
designs.
How can this new knowledge be applied: This information can be applied to
considering or reconsidering the aspirations and planning of your organization,
your personal sense of longevity, your personal and professional sense of your
preferred future for health and health care, and what you can do to make it
happen.
Clement Bezold, founder and chairman of the board, Institute for
Alternative Futures, Alexandria, Virginia
William Rowley, COO, senior futurist, Institute for Alternative Futures,
Alexandria, Virginia
key word: health care
issue area: Health and Wellness Futures
Nanomedicines and
Personalized Medicine: Two Pieces in the Future of Medicine?
While nanotechnology promises to
transform most industries, it will have a particularly
profound impact on health
care and medicine. Nanomedicine
is part of the high risk, high payoff global
nanotechnology phenomenon. Nanomedicine refers to the
medical application of nanotechnology—it ranges from
biomedical imaging to drug delivery and therapeutics.
Medicine in the future will be
more "personalized ," where patients will receive
treatment based upon the actual underlying biology of
their disease state, not only their symptoms. This
approach, coupled with nanomedicines,
nanopharmaceuticals and targeted drug delivery
technologies, will have the ability to deliver
pharmaceuticals to a particular tissue or specific site
in the body, followed by release of the "drug payload"
at that tissue or site. The pace of these two
transformations is anyone’s guess, but anticipating and
planning for the profound consequences is vital.
Who should attend:
Anyone interested in
nanomedicines and personalized
medicine.
What you’ll learn: Attendees will get
a glimpse of the coming revolution in medicine. As we
enter the "golden era" of nanomedicine in the next
decade, attendees will experience how it will affect
every aspect of human existence in novel and
revolutionary ways. Additionally, the attendees will
learn how personalized medicine will become the
cornerstone of medical practice in the future.
How can this new knowledge be applied:
This information will prepare you for the profound
future impact of nanomedicine and personalized medicine.
Attendees will experience how these two approaches in
the future will deliver to the market both evolutionary
as well as novel products, enabling the human body to be
analyzed and repaired in novel, revolutionary ways.
Raj Bawa,
president and CEO, Bawa Biotechnology Consulting, LLC,
Ashburn, Virginia; professor, Rensseler Polytechnic
Institute, Troy, New York
key words:
personalized medicine, nanomedicine, health
care
issue areas:
Health and Wellness Futures, Technology and
Science
For more information contact: World Future
Society, 7910 Woodmont Avenue, Suite
450, Bethesda, Maryland 20814;
Tel: 1-800-989-8274 or 1-301-656-8274; Fax: 1-301-951-0394;
Web Site:
www.wfs.org; E-mail:
sechard@wfs.org.
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