Beyond Today’s Patient Experience: Imagining Care Futures
Beyond Today’s Patient Experience: Imagining Care Futures
Workshop with Heinrich Schwarz · 14 October 2026
SPX International Congress
Workshop with Heinrich Schwarz · 14 October 2026SPX International Congress
Conceptual focus
LEARNING FRAMEWORK
Patient experience initiatives often focus on understanding today’s needs, journeys, and feedback. While essential, this perspective alone is no longer sufficient. Healthcare is changing rapidly — through new technologies, shifting people’s expectations, regulatory developments, demographic change, and growing uncertainty – and healthcare professionals and innovators need ways to prepare for futures that may differ significantly from the present.
PROPOSAL
This interactive, hands-on workshop introduces participants to futuring: the practice of actively imagining and working with multiple possible futures to better understand current assumptions and design more resilient, patient- and people-centric care. Drawing on strategic foresight, design fiction, and speculative design, participants will explore a shared challenge around how patients are informed about treatment decisions and care pathways in the future.
Through short inputs and collaborative group work, participants will experiment with future-oriented perspectives, make future scenarios tangible, and reflect on their implications for real hospital and care contexts. The workshop emphasizes learning by doing and does not require prior experience with futures or design methods. Everybody is invited.
Target
INTENDED PARTICIPANTS
This workshop is aimed at a multidisciplinary audience committed to improving the patient experience and driving transformation efforts: executives, senior managers, healthcare professionals, project managers, patients, caregivers, and representatives of patient and user associations.
Practical details
ENGLISH WORKSHOP
This workshop will be held in English. Limited places available.
More than 8 specialised workshops
IN ENGLISH AND FRENCH
If you have any questions about this workshop,
please contact us at [email protected]
Objectives
LEARNING OUTCOMES
By the end of this workshop, participants will have
• gained a practical introduction to three widely used futuring approaches,
• experienced how imagining multiple futures can help prepare for possible evolutions of patient experience, explore the concrete implications of future designs, and critically challenge current assumptions,
• developed new perspectives on the opportunities and tensions involved in informing patients in meaningful and ethical ways – today and in the futures to come.
Programme structure
SESSION FLOW
The final agenda with confirmed timings will be shared soon.
Click on each title to view full details and the duration of each block.
0. Welcome session at Hôpital National des Quinze-Vingts [ 90 min ]
The day will begin with a plenary welcome and orientation session in the auditorium at Hôpital National des Quinze-Vingts, including introductory remarks by the Director General and the Patient Experience lead. This opening session will present the host hospital’s perspective on Patient Experience and provide institutional context for the day.
Following this introduction, participants registered for the workshop with Heinrich Schwarzwill join their group and move to the designated room. Lunch will be provided at the hospital, and a break will be scheduled during the workshop day. The final timetable with confirmed timings and room allocation will be shared soon.
The day will conclude with a closing cocktail bringing together participants from all seven workshops, held across the three satellite hospitals in Paris.
The day will begin with a plenary welcome and orientation session in the auditorium at Hôpital National des Quinze-Vingts, including introductory remarks by the Director General and the Patient Experience lead. This opening session will present the host hospital’s perspective on Patient Experience and provide institutional context for the day.
2. Workshop [ 5 hours ]
Following this introduction, participants registered for the workshop with Heinrich Schwarz will join their group and move to the designated room. Lunch will be provided at the hospital, and a break will be scheduled during the workshop day. The final timetable with confirmed timings and room allocation will be shared soon.
3. Networking Cocktail [ 7pm – 9pm ]
At the end of the workshop, participants from the workshops hosted at the same hospital will proceed to the closing cocktail, courtesy of the Embassy of Denmark.
Please note that SPX does not organise transportation between Hôpital des Quinze-Vingts and the cocktail location.
Heinrich Schwarz
FACULTY
Heinrich Schwarz, Ph.D, is an innovation strategist, design thinker and transformation catalyst, focusing on people-centred and sustainable healthcare. He is specialised in helping clients turn a deep understanding of people, cultures and technology into impactful solutions and sustainable transformation.
Founder of two niche innovation consultancies he has worked internationally as advisor, facilitator, researcher and teacher for more than 20 years. He also held positions as management consultant in Denmark and academic faculty in the US. He received a PhD in science and technology studies from MIT.