How much time do you spend thinking about the future? Enough? Too much?

Sometimes it’s hard to create the space to look forward and imagine what is and what isn’t possible. Healthcare organisations spend a lot of time trying to predict the future develop strategies that will work for them. Often in isolation and sometimes without deep consideration for speed of change.

Technology will increasingly become central to everything we do in healthcare. It is something we’d be foolish to ignore; it fragments and changes services beyond recognition; it has the powerful potential to create deeply personal health budgets. We are facing a future where people will want to decide how to manage their own health outcomes and become more demanding of healthcare professional as a consequence.

It is a complex and difficult landscape and one which in the bid world requires you to gaze into the future without any great certainty. However there are steps you can take to help manage this process. It starts early, way before the bid is out to market and involves building a strong business strategy leading into a well conceived capture plan. By the time the bid pops out, you should have worked with commissioners, partners and patients to think about what steps you can take to radically improve your services and ask yourself the deep and challenging questions about how that might unsettle the status quo.

Doing this will almost certainly improve your bid, engage your commissioners and help you not only win or retain business but have a profoundly different outlook towards your services in the future. We can see how this type of approach is fundamental to the recent Vanguard sites and how the future will be shaped by a very different set of rules.