From Doctor to Futurist: Step #1 The Decision

Now that I’m a few weeks away from defending my PhD thesis in the field of clinical genomics, I decided to start looking for new challenges in my academic career, and I pretty soon found it: becoming a futurist is the next step! This is the topic about which I have been writing on my blog and speaking in my presentations for many years. I just have to centralize the flow of information, my ideas and research projects under one entity, getting involved in futuristic studies.

I browsed among the names of futurists, and healthcare & medicine are not the most frequently covered topics therefore I think there is a niche for futurists working on the future trends of medicine and healthcare with a special focus on digital communication and e-patients.

In case you wonder what a futurist exactly is:

Futurists (not in the sense of futurism) or futurologists are scientists and social scientists whose speciality is to attempt to systematically predict the future, whether that of human society in particular or of life on earth in general.

I talked with many futurists and the first thing they mentioned was that it’s pretty hard to describe what a futurist actually does and there aren’t many institutions dedicated to the medical aspects of this field. But I don’t give up things easily and decided to document each step in this probably long and exciting process. Next, I’ll collect the available research groups, associations and online repositories.

I’m very excited about this and I hope you will follow me on this road, actually I very much count on your feedback. For a doctor with a life-long mission of helping e-patients and the new generation of medical professionals with digital technologies and social media, I cannot wait to discover this new area.