HFD is sponsored by the Detroit Medical Center as a service to help everyone--physicians, nurses, faculty, managers--understand the implications of emerging technologies and be prepared to handle accelerating change. It may also serve to alert researchers and practitioners to advances relevant to their immediate research or practice needs and activities.

HFD collects, collates, and summarizes information from the major news and certain technology publications, and interprets the information in the context of the key premises that technological innovation in healthcare . . .

• Affects and is affected by the economy, government policy, and advances in other technologies,
• Accelerates the trend to patient self-care,
• Accelerates a trend towards a state of "superhealth",
  Accelerates the emergence of acute policy, practice, and ethical issues, and
• Overloads the capacity of practitioners, executives, and trustees to monitor, absorb, and assess its progress.

To place innovations in diagnostics and therapeutics in context, each issue opens with an Acceleration section assessing and describing advances that illustrate that innovation in general is accelerating. 

Sections on Computing & Communications, Devices & Materials, and Robotics focus on advances in technologies which, while having applications in their own right or in other industries, have equal or greater significance or potential in healthcare. 

Sections on Policy and Practice illustrate how innovations are affecting, or are being affected by, government policies, ethical issues, and provider practices. 

Finally, a section on Creating the Future at DMC/WSU features articles about leading-edge technologies, processes, and research being developed at DMC and WSU, and relates them to the broad trends identified in the other sections. 

(Depending on the volume of advances in any given month, sections may be omitted or divided, or new sections may be included,)