Health futures
Having a sense of what the future of healthcare and diabetes care might hold is of vital importance given today’s global diabetes pandemic and how relatively unprepared health systems are to respond.
Trendspotting and scenarios help to identify the way in which an uncertain future may evolve. Novo Nordisk works with diabetes scenarios as a way to focus our own strategy, to spark innovation, and to stimulate discussion and collaboration with others towards new solutions.
Performance 2006
In 2006 we updated our previous scenario project, Diabetes 2020, by publishing the results of a new scenario exercise, ‘Diabetes towards 2025’. Download the scenarios here:
Diabetes towards 2025: Medicine and choice
Diabetes towards 2025: Service and control
The conclusions from the Diabetes 2020 scenarios were highly optimistic about the speed of future changes in technology, health policy and resource allocation, and about the ability of the health system to transform itself and better deal with chronic diseases. Furthermore, we were positive about the speed of emerging cross-sector coalitions to support healthy living and propel chronic diseases to the top of health policy and research agendas.
Much of the optimism appears to have been premature. The old underlying forces and the socio-economic factors that define our world are still powerful.
The Diabetes 2025 scenarios are rooted in well-established current trends in four general areas.
- Lifestyle and values
- Health and society
- Life science
- The role of the corporation
The scenarios were developed in consultation with a wide range of stakeholders, including industry, academia, NGOs and government as well as people with diabetes.
The Diabetes 2025 scenarios present two alternative future paths:
Medicine and choice
Medicine and choice is a biomedical scenario that largely extends the current situation. The massive investment of the biotech and pharmaceutical industries in research and development leads to a plethora of innovations that people and societies are willing to pay for. Medical control of disease increasingly encompasses the risk factors that lead to ill health. Consumers are offered more choice than ever but also bear more of the financial and decision-making burden.
Service and control
Service and control is a public health scenario in which the promise of biomedical innovation fails to materialise and medical therapy is rarely part of preventing type 2 diabetes. Payers will actively seek to reverse unhealthy behaviours that are likely to result in diabetes and other chronic diseases. Individuals will be offered strong incentives to lead healthy lives and accept being monitored in order to receive affordable quality care. Delivery of chronic disease health services mostly happens outside the traditional healthcare system.
Novo Nordisk’s approach
Novo Nordisk’s vision is to defeat diabetes. Scenarios help provide the long-term perspective we need for realising this audacious goal. They serve to challenge conventional wisdom and help us see elements of the future and possibilities for action that might otherwise have remained hidden. Since we cannot confidently predict the future, scenarios are useful frameworks to help determine how to navigate successfully in different possible environments.
We are thinking through these scenarios at a time when many people are suffering from diabetes and many more are at risk, and when there is significant uncertainty as to which solutions will be pursued within disease prevention and who will lead the way. By identifying possible health futures, we can eliminate some of that uncertainty and begin defining how to navigate successfully in each of the possible environments.
This page has been assessed by PricewaterhouseCoopers as part of its assessment of Novo Nordisk’s statement that it reports ‘in accordance’ with GRI. Please refer to Audit and assurance for a full description of the nature of assurance offered.
