Using Foresight Methods to Anticipate Future Threats

The authors describe a unique foresight framework for health care managers to use in longer-term planning. This framework uses scenario-building to envision plausible alternate futures of the U.S. health care system and links those broad futures to business-model-specific load-bearing assumptions. Because the framework the authors describe simultaneously addresses very broad and very specific issues, it can be easily applied to a broad range of health care issues by using the broad framework and business-specific assumptions for the particular case at hand. The authors illustrate this method using the case of disease management, pointing out that although the industry continues to grow rapidly, its future also contains great uncertainties.