The Need For Medical Futures Studies: Our Benchmark Study

Futures studies is an interdisciplinary approach to explore and analyse possible futures. Such types of research aim to envision and prepare for eventualities and have been adopted by policymakers. The United Arab Emirates government has devised a Future Foresight Strategy while the UN Secretary General proposed a global Summit of the Future in 2023.

While futures methodologies have been applied in various fields, in medicine and healthcare, their potentials have mostly been unmet, despite their growing importance in the digital health era. The latest research from The Medical Futurist Institute highlights such a need and even argues for the establishment of a dedicated ‘Medical Futures Studies’ sub-field.

This study, titled “Exploring the Need for Medical Futures Studies: Insights from a Scoping Review of Healthcare Foresight”, has been accepted by the Journal of Medical Internet Research and will be published shortly in open access. We condense the main findings and recommendations of our research in this article but encourage you to read it in its entirety here as we consider it to be the benchmark for a potential new sub-field of medicine and healthcare.