In the future, the job description of a doctor may not include diagnosis -- and that could be an improvement for health-care practitioners, says Gabriel Harp, research manager for Technology Horizons at San Francisco's Institute for the Future. Harp is bringing his vision, and the research to back it up, to the first of the 2012-13 Education, Creativity + Technology Speaker Series,
iCON-Edu -- a program of the Pittsburgh Technology Council’s Creative Technology Network.
"We don't do predictions," Harp cautions. "We try to create scenarios and alternatives." Nonetheless, Harp has spent the past year working with California colleges to "look at what are some of the big forces … that are causing change," he says, and what changes to industries, from media to agriculture, retail to health care, will affect our need for STEM education (science, technology, engineering and math) and the future career paths that will reflect those changes.
One of those changes will be in "big data," as he puts it -- the massive amounts of information collected and shared for analysis. Doctors, for instance, may actually enjoy the challenge of diagnosis, but as accurate diagnosis requires more and more data being collected beforehand, "it is ripe for a certain amount of automation," Harp says. In the future created by this scenario, nurse practitioners may be the ones with more time to access and process all this data -- and so they may need the education to handle the task.
The new courses these Nurse Practitioners will need, as well as their job descriptions and the devices they will handle, are all Artifacts of the Future that Harp will present as part of his talk in Pittsburgh.
The other presentations in the iCON-Edu series will be:
- New Visions for Play + Education on Nov. 14, 2012, as part of the Three Rivers Education Technology Conference;
- MAKING Innovation on March 21, 2013 at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center; and
- Creativity, Innovation + Imagination: The Creativity Post on May 22, 2013 as part of the 2013 Design, Art and Technology Awards (DATA) and Creative Technology Showcase
Pittsburgh, notes Harp, "is a great melting pot, in a way … and Pittsburgh has always been this space where art, design, technology and engineering share a common place."
Writer:
Marty Levine
Source: Gabriel Harp, Institute for the Future