BMJ  2004;328:1197-1199 (15 May), doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7449.1197

Education and debate

Four rules for the reinvention of health care

¹ Centre for Health Informatics, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2055, Australia e.coiera@unsw.edu.au

If health care is to evolve at a pace that will meet the needs of society it will need to embrace this science of sociotechnical design, but ultimately it is our culture's beliefs and values that shape what we will create and what we dream

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Futurists might like to speculate on what the health services of 2020 look like. The world may be such that as a clinician you work in flexible virtual teams and some of your colleagues are computers. You would of course instinctively mistrust clinicians who always know the answer without consulting the information grid, and patients often choose to be the team leader. Keyboards are banned as harmful and can be found in museums, next to punch cards and spittoons. The health record is a direct multimedia history of conversations, and a software agent is its curator. For the still cognitively limited clinician, your earring whispers your patient's name when you meet.

More importantly, in 2020 the health system in most nations will have to treat proportionately more people, with more illness, using relatively fewer tax dollars and workers.¹ Given that commentators today are alarmed at the current strains on the . . . [Full text of this article]

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Rapid Responses:

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Health systems in 2020!

Dr. Naseem A. Qureshi, MD, IMAPA, LMIPS
bmj.com, 20 May 2004 [Full text]

Education for All

susanne McCabe
bmj.com, 21 May 2004 [Full text]

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