the same thing as health, our focus is on early defining influences that help us
forecast lasting effects on the health of Americans.

The tenets of chaos theory and the sciences of complexity remind us of
the rule of first forces--that the first intervening events and influences are
disproportionately influential in determining outcomes. Modeling first forces
in the context of change helps the observer anticipate the emerging system.

As the nation has wrestled with new initiatives in health care and infor-
mation infrastructure, we already see patterns of growth that form a useful
basis for forecasting what an American health care system might look like by
the year 2000. Yet the field remains a rich and uncharted frontier that
beckons the scientist, the policy maker, and the entrepreneur to make
critical contributions.

This book is the best compendium of these first forces, which will help
determine the scope and potential of the emerging interactive media as they
are being applied to health concerns. The distinguished authors, all pioneers
in their own fields, describe such things as member-centered managed care,
demand management, telemedicine, provider teamwork, patient involve-
ment in health care decision making, reinventing government, new media
pedagogy, interactive health education in schools, simulation in health edu-
cation, and the new dynamics of public-private sector responsibilities.

For readers who are struggling to understand health from the perspective
of the new media, or the new media from the perspective of health, this book
will help them knit together the early vectors of managed care, a reinvented
public health and health education, an empowered public, and the interac-
tive media into a tapestry of their own making on which future contributions
will be made.

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