Health care delivery, therapies and pharmaceuticals face major changes throughout the industrial world. As cost containment strategies are introduced by governments, as payers become more conscious and influential in their decisions about shaping therapies, and as consumers become more involved in directing their own health care, health care providers and pharmaceutical companies are being challenged to rethink the way they do business. This volume explores these changes and the potential responses. Parallel developments in health care delivery, information systems, pharmaceutical discovery and development are explored in Europe, the U.S. and Japan. Alternative futures or scenarios of health systems in 2010 summarize this diversity in the context of economic growth and economic hard times. This book explores the future of biomedical science by considering how the social, political and economic context in health care delivery and pharmaceutical industry will evolve. There is a slight chance that the future will be a successful extrapolation of the present, far more likely are scenarios which forecast major changes in the paradigms of medicine and health policy. The papers and scenarios in this book review that broader range of change.
