Future health care technology and the hospital.

The past decades have been a time of rapid technological change in health care, but technological change will probably accelerate during the next decade or so. This will bring problems, but it will also present certain opportunities. In particular, the health care system is faced with the need to spend its limited resources more effectively. The number of hospital beds is being reduced, and lengths of stay are falling. In the future, the health care system will have to care for an increasing number of elderly people, both with chronic disease and also with dependency because of frailty and functional problems. The hospital of the future will probably be smaller and more intensive in the nature of its care. In part, this is because many present and future clinical technologies can be delivered outside of the hospital setting. And communication technologies offer the possibility of tying the various parts of the health care system into one true system. This would mean that the future hospital would have a more active role in supervising technical care outside of the hospital, and in making specialized knowledge accessible in all parts of the health system.