The Growth of DIY Digital Health – What’s Behind the Zeitgeist of Self-Reliance?
Most people in the U.S. use at least one medical device at home — likely a blood pressure monitor. used by nearly one-half of people based on a survey of 2,000 consumers conducted for Propel Software. The Propel study’s insights build on what we know is a growing ethos among health consumers seeking to take more control over their health care and the rising costs of medical bills and out-of-pocket expenses. That includes oral health and dental bills: 2 in 5 U.S. consumers use electric toothbrushes (a growing smart-device category at the
A Mis-Trust Hangover for Health Care 5 Years After COVID Began – an Edelman Trust Barometer Update
On March 11, 2020, The World Health Organization announced that the coronavirus was deemed a pandemic. WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus asserted, “We have called every day for countries to take urgent and aggressive action. We have rung the alarm bell loud and clear.” Five years later, Edelman has fielded a survey to determine what some 4,000 health citizens living in 4 countries (Brazil, India, the UK, and the U.S.) are thinking and feeling about life after COVID-19 — and especially where their trust lies in institutions, fellow citizens, and future public health emergencies. I listened in on a discussion
The Top Patient Safety Risks in 2025 Are Mostly About the “Human OS” – Reading ECRI’s Annual Report
Each year, ECRI (the ECRI Institute) publishes an annual report on the Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns for the year. The 2025 list was published today. My read of it is that most of these risks have to do with what I’ve been referring to as the Human OS, the Human Operating System, in my talks and teachings. In this post, I’ll focus on 2 of the 10 most top-of-mind in my current workflow with clients and speaking: #1 and #3. Here’s the list of 10, calling out: Risks of dismissing
Consumers Are Financially Stressed – What This Means for Health/Care in 2025
People define health across many life-flows: physical health, mental health, social health, appearance (“how I look impacts how I feel”) and, to be sure, financial well-being. In tracking this last health factor for U.S. consumers, several pollsters are painting a picture of financially-stressed Americans as President Trump tallies his first six weeks into the job. The top-line of the studies is that the percent of people in America feeling financially wobbly has increased since the fourth quarter of 2024. I’ll review these studies in this post, and discuss several potential impacts we should keep in mind for peoples’ health and
Think Quintuple Aim This Week at #HIMSS25
As HIMSS 2025, the largest annual conference on health information and innovation meets up in Las Vegas this week, we can peek into what’s on the organization’s CEO’s mind leading up to the meeting in this conversation between Hal Wolf, CEO of HIMSS, and Gil Bashe, Managing Director of FINN Partners. If you are unfamiliar with HIMSS, Hal explains in the discussion that HIMSS’s four focuses are digital health transformation, the deployment and utilization of AI as a tool, cybersecurity to protect peoples’ personal information and its use, and, workforce development. I have my own research agenda(s) underneath these themes
Improve Sleep, Improve the World and Health: ResMed’s Look at Global Sleep Trends
The world would be a better place if we had more, and better quality sleep. That’s the hopeful conclusion from the fifth annual Global Sleep Survey from ResMed. ResMed’s global reach with the sleeping public enabled the company to access the perspectives of over 30,000 respondents in 13 markets, finding that one in 3 people have trouble falling or staying asleep 3 or more times a week. We now live in “a world struggling with poor sleep” — “a world without rest,” ResMed coins our sleepless situation. The irony is that most people believe
Telehealth, Right Here, Right Now: Calling on Congress to Vote for America’s Health and Well-being
In the U.S., there are some issues that still unite most Americans in 2025. We can agree that, • The cost of eggs is too high • AI can be both exciting and promising at the same time as concerning • It sucks to have your personal data cyberattacked and breached, and, • Having access to telehealth is important. While I would be really sad to give up my omelets, I’m sticking a mindful toe into AI for some simple workflows, and I’m still dealing with the aftermath of the Change Healthcare data breach, it’s the looming telehealth deadline that’s
GLP-1s at the Pharmacy – A Lens on Consumer-Driven Retail Health (with Hims & Hers stock price update)
The nature of retail pharmacy is changing, with both threats and opportunities re-shaping the business itself, and the pharmacy’s role in the larger health/care ecosystem. To keep sharp on the topics, I attended Rx Market Insights: Performance Trends and Outlook for 2025, a data-rich session presented on February 18 by IQVIA and sponsored by Ascend Laboratories. The webinar was hosted by DSN (Drug Store News), appropriately so because the action-packed hour went into detail providing the current state of prescription drugs and the pharmacy in America. Doug Long, IQVIA’s VP of Industry Relations, and Scott Biggs, the company’s Director of Supplier
COVID-19 Further Splits American Society as Trust Continues to Erode – a 5-Year Perspective from Pew
The partisan divide in the U.S., exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, could set the stage for another public health emergency given eroding trust in institutions — especially in media, government, and public health officials. I base this sobering forecast on the latest study from the Pew Research Center which polled people in the U.S. about their pandemic-perspectives, detailed in the report 5 Years Later: America Looks Back at the Impact of COVID-19. Couple these findings with the recent dismissal of public health “disease detectors” working with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and what is currently termed a “quademic” (that
Physicians’ Confidence In and Use of AI is Rising, AMA Finds – Coupling Demand With Many Enabling Factors
Doctors’ use of and demand for augmented intelligence in medical practice is on the rise — with many factors that could bolster or risk adoption on the journey toward AI in the doctor’s office, based on the latest survey from the American Medical Association (AMA) published this week. The AMA polled U.S. physicians in November 2024 to gauge their views on augmented intelligence (AI) addressing doctors’ use of AI, perceived opportunities and risks, and enabling factors for adoption. This study updates AMA’s survey conducted in 2023 and found significantly growing confidence and utilization
Health/Care at Super Bowl LIX, GLP-1s, Kaiser and Tufts on Food-As-Medicine, and the RFK, Jr. Factor: A Health Consumer Check-In
In the wake of the always-creative ads for Super Bowl and last Sunday’s LIX bout, game-watchers got to see a plethora of commercials dedicated to the annual event’s major features: food and game-day eating. Oh, and what’s turned out to be the most controversial commercial, the one on GLP-1s from Hims & Hers. In that vein, and converging with many news and policy events, I’m trend-weaving the latest insights into that most consumer-facing of the social determinants of health: food, and in particular, health consumers viewing and adopting food as part of their health and well-being moves. First, to the
Health Consumer Check-In: From Digital Detox to Analog Wellness, Social Re-Wilding, and a Return to the Bookstore
As humans have undergone personal digital transformations, living omni-channel and appreciating the conveniences that being switched-on can bring, there’s a growing demand for “analog wellness.” That’s one of ten trends covered in the Global Wellness Institute’s (GWI) report on 2025 Wellness Trends, and one I want to dig into early this year as consumers are facing growing challenges to our privacy, social bullying, and workforce stressors compelling many employees to spend too many hours in digital isolation and loneliness. To paint the larger landscape of and drivers underpinning analog wellness, I will weave several important reports and studies together, all
Measuring Progress for Life Sciences: Trust, Patient Access, and Prevention at a Fork in the Road of Public Health
How will we know if the life sciences sector is advancing in 2025? This is the question asked at the start of the report, a Research Brief: 2025 Indicators of Progress for the Life Sciences Sector, from the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science (IQVIA). To answer that question, IQVIA identified ten indicators for this 2025 profile on the life sciences sector. I selected four key data points for this discussion which provide particularly informative insights for my advisory work right now at the intersection of health, people/consumers, and technology: Trust for/with/in life science
Some Bipartisan Concurrence on Health Care Issues in the U.S. – But Trust in Health Care Isn’t Bipartisan – KFF’s January 2025 Polls
Two polls from one poll source paint at once a bipartisan and bipolar picture of U.S. health citizens when it comes to health care issues versus health care institutions in America. The Kaiser Family Foundation has hit the 2025 health policy ground running in publishing the January 2025 Health Tracking Poll last week and a poll on health care trust and mis-information yesterday. First, the health tracking poll which finds some concurrence between Democrats and Republicans on several big issues facing Americans and various aspects of their health care. As
Can the Private Sector Serve Up Sufficient Health Media to Compensate for Public Sector Gaps?
In researching several .gov websites from last Monday 20th January 2025, I had an ongoing frustrating user experience in being faced with “404 Error” messages like this one from WhiteHouse.gov. “President Trump’s First Week Hammered Public Health,” Dr. Arthur Kellerman, an ER doc, public health researcher, and patient advocate asserted in Forbes yesterday: “For now, the only health communications Americans receive will come from sources outside the government, such as professional societies, non-governmental organizations, advocacy groups, and businesses, vaccine skeptics, conspiracy theorists, foreign agents and bots posing as Americans to spread disinformation. It will be up to us to figure out what to
There’s a Health Gap for Women Around the World – and the World Economic Forum Has a Blueprint to Fix It
Even though women comprise one-half of the world’s population, their health outcomes and inputs do not match up to men’s: there’s a women’s health gap on Planet Earth. Meeting in Davos this week for #WEF2025, the World Economic Forum published a report on that gender-health chasm titled, Blueprint to Close the Women’s Health Gap: How to Improve Lives and Economies for All. In collaboration with the McKinsey Health Institute, the report focuses on nine key conditions that, if addressed, could reduce the global disease burden by 27 million disability adjusted life years and add
Trust and Grievance in 2025: The Edelman Trust Barometer on MLK Jr. Day Converging with the World Economic Forum Kick-Off and the Inauguration of the 47th U.S. President
At the start of each new year comes the World Economic Forum meet-up in Davos, Switzerland and with that conference start today, 20 January 2025, the publication of the Edelman Trust Barometer. Now in the study’s 25th annual edition, the Edelman Trust Barometer this year finds us, globally, in a Crisis of Grievance which is eroding trust. Edelman surveyed 1,150 residents (plus or minus) in each of 28 countries around the world, yielding over 33,000 citizens’ voices sharing perspectives on trust and institutions. Interviews were fielded from late October to mid-November 2024.
How Tariffs Could Wreak Havoc on Health Care Costs and Supply Chains in the U.S.
Non-clinical goods and services can comprise $1 in $5 of net patient revenue in the U.S. health care economy, research from LogicSource gauges. The possible tariffs proposed by the next U.S. President could drive those costs up, eroding financial margins in many parts of American health care — from hospitals to drug companies and med-tech innovators. Simply put, “President-elect Donald Trump’s pledge to enact across-the-board tariffs isn’t going over well in the health care industry,” POLITICO reported. Why worry about tariffs’ impacts on health care? Ask the CFO of Reckitt, Shannon Eisenhardt, who spoke
Connecting for Health at Home: A Unified Field Theory from #CES2025 (On Samsung, Withings, and Panasonic)
There were over 4,500 exhibitors on the show floor of the 2025 CES in Las Vegas last week, addressing every imaginable aspect of consumers’ daily lives as we increasingly coexist with technology to support life, liberty, and our personal pursuits of happiness….. ….and health. My focus is always on health, and in the past decade and a half, health/care, everywhere. So my lens on #CES2025 looked out for specific point solutions for health, medical care, fitness and well-being, along with adjacencies for mobility/auto, environmental health (think: clean air, clean water), kitchen appliances and food-tech, and home care (not the medical
Nurses Rank Highest in Honesty and Ethics in Professions Far Above All Other Work Roles in America – The Gallup Annual Survey 2025
While nursing has ranked top of U.S. professions for honesty and ethics for over a decade, U.S. adults speak even more assuredly in 2025 that nurses far outrank other professions in America. according to the latest Gallup Poll. The study summary report is titled, “Americans’ Ratings of U.S. Professions Stay Historically Low.” The data speak for itself — in 2025, the margin of people who put nurses on top of all other professions in America is much wider than in past years — and physicians have fallen further down
In a year where health policy will shake, rattle, and roll in the U.S., I'm grateful to be identified as writing one of the best blogs dealing with the topic this year. Thank you, Feedspot, for this recognition amidst great company -- other folks whose work my own depends on!
I am gratified and grateful for my Health Populi blog to be named #1 by Feedspot in the category of Best Women in Medicine Blogs and Websites for 2025. Thank you, Team Feedspot!
Jane will deliver the keynote address at the upcoming Paradigm Management Services 2025 Innovation Summit in Nashville on 28th March. We'll focus on equitable outcomes in a changing society, addressing drivers of health, barriers to techquity, and opportunities for joyful collaborations for the health of all people.