A new Institute for the Future initiative and game, “Future of the Hospital” asks a provocative question, “What if your hospital wasn’t there when you needed it most?”

Yes, you read correctly – the collaborative forecasting game allows experts and “ordinary people” to submit ideas reinventing the community hospital, an institution facing near insurmountable challenges, or so it seems. The game is January 8-9, 2013, but you can whet your innovation appetite with pre-selected daunting questions and challenges via the Game Blog. These are behemoth questions, so tweet your wild ideas to @FutureHospitals, or use the #FutureHospitals hashtag.

Our current solution clearly isn’t cutting it, so why not forget everything you know about the community hospital and start anew? You know you have these ideas sitting at the nurses’ station or in between triaging patients or after a ridiculously challenging shift…”What if…” Go ahead, share those thoughts with us. Spur us to think differently.

Be sure to sign up for the game and to receive the weekly challenge questions in preparation of the game. I look forward to seeing your “crazy” ideas to transform the healthcare landscape.