The FutureS of healthcare

This editorial for the special issue of FutureS is not intended to provide a comprehensive, analytical overview of the future of health care; rather, it collects the perspectives on which scholars have focused most. There is a danger that what we report will quickly become obsolete for numerous reasons; think of the speed of current technological progress or the fact that the Covid-19 pandemic could further stress health care systems around the world. However, we would like to outline some of the current topics explored in the literature and focus on the scenarios envisioned by practitioners. We write this piece being interested in the innovative impulses of all the actors belonging to the "renewed" health care ecosystem, aware of the fact that there are significant differences between the countries of the North and South of the world and, consequently, between their health care systems. What we can say with certainty is that the healthcare and life sciences are the protagonists of an unparalleled revolution. The aging population and changing needs, the increasingly common occurrence of chronic disorders, and digitization are some of the challenges facing the sector. The technological change of the fourth industrial revolution is disruptive and changes the logic of the market, not only that of healthcare but also that of adjacent markets. Because of the intensity with which insiders have to face these new trends, the topic has been the focus of interest of scholars and practitioners in recent years. The big players in consulting, as well as the scholars, have deepened the issues of healthcare of the future, focusing on what will be the major challenges in 10 years and imagining potential scenarios that will reconfigure the way health care is delivered and used. In the next 10 years, there will be profound demographic changes and the healthcare system will necessarily have to reconfigure the supply of the necessary services and the methods of delivery (KPMG, 2018). Due to the aging of the population, there has already been a dramatic increase in chronic and degenerative diseases requiring complex treatment in recent years. In addition, the Covid-19 pandemic that has been sweeping the world since 2019 has strained global health systems, revealed already existing weaknesses, even in the most advanced countries, and is representing an important moment of reflection for all policymakers. The whole world is questioning what will need to be done to foster greater effectiveness of national systems as well as better capacity to cope with shocks of such magnitude. In this document we explore what practitioners and scholars consider the main future challenges and the major changes that need to be made in the healthcare sector in order to embrace a new paradigm of care, based on the centrality of the patient, on prevention and not on cure, on technologies at the side of humans.