Technology and the future of healthcare

Healthcare changes dramatically because of technological developments, from anesthetics and antibiotics to magnetic resonance imaging scanners and radiotherapy. Future technological innovation is going to keep transforming healthcare, yet while technologies (new drugs and treatments, new devices, new social media support for healthcare, etc) will drive innovation, human factors will remain one of the stable limitations of breakthroughs. No predictions can satisfy everybody; instead, this article explores fragments of the future to see how to think more clearly about how to get where we want to go. Significance for public healthTechnology drives healthcare more than any other force, and in the future it will continue to develop in dramatic ways. While we can glimpse and debate the details of future trends in healthcare, we need to be clear about the drivers so we can align with them and actively work to ensure the best outcomes for society as a whole.