A blog covering the health/care ecosystem and people.

AARP found that 7 in 10 people ages 50+ are “app-receptive” for health and wellness apps in Unlocking Health and Wellness Apps: Experiences of Adults Age 50-Plus, a summary of research conducted with U.S. consumers 50 and over from AARP.           The methodology for this study included only older consumers who were comfortable in downloading apps to smartphones or tablets, and were willing to do so — whom AARP considered the target audience for this research. In addition, the respondents surveyed were also at least interested in trying apps designed for health and wellness, thus dubbed “health

The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) was founded in 1945 by a group of scientists concerned about the atomic bomb — sharing a mission to focus on technology, science, and innovation to, in the Association’s words, “work toward a safer, more equitable, and more peaceful world.”           Nearly 80 years after the organization’s launch, the FAS is focusing on the growing role of artificial and augmented intelligence across the many areas that touch peoples’ lives — including health care and well-being. The FAS published a state-of-the-nation essay on June 27 on Improving Health Equity Through AI.

Most Americans follow some kind of eating regime, seeking energy, more protein, and healthy aging, according to the annual 2024 Food & Health Survey published this week by the International Food Information Council (IFIC). But a person’s household finances play a direct role in their ability to balance healthful food purchases and healthy eating, IFIC learned.              In this 19th annual fielding of this research, IFIC explored 3,000 U.S. consumers’ perspectives on diet and nutrition, trusted sources for food information, and new insights into peoples’ views on the GLP-1 weight-loss drugs and the growing sense

“The greatest opportunity offered by AI is not reducing errors or workloads, or even curing cancer: it is the opportunity to restore the precious and time-honored connection and trust,” Dr. Eric Topol wrote in his 2019 book, Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again. In the five years since Dr. Topol looked for AI to bolster the human-touch in health care, we’ve lived, worked, and muddled our way through the COVID-19 pandemic and witnessed the growing epidemic of burnout among clinicians, the front-line of medical care. I recalled Dr. Topol’s assertion on AI’s promise for humanizing health

Less than 50% of people living in 16 countries do not trust government, media, or NGOs to do what is right to address their health needs and concerns, based on the responses from over 15,000 people living in 16 countries whose opinions are captured in the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer’s Special Report on Trust and Health.           Edelman launched the 2024 Trust Barometer earlier this year during the Davos World Economic Forum, and today released this round of research focused on health. Globally (among health citizens in the 16 countries polled in the study), trust for

As we start the month of April 2024 in the U.S., it’s tax season in America with Federal (and other) income taxes due on the 15th of the month. This is also the time my research clock alarm goes off for an important annual report that describes the latest profile of the patient-as-payer in the U.S. ‘Tis the season for J.P. Morgan’s InstaMed team to analyze health care payments data, describing the experiences of consumers, providers and payers in the Trends in Healthcare Payments Fourteenth Annual Report.                   The overall takeaway for

With the urgent need to identify more efficient and lower-cost health care delivery models, we look to growing evidence for digital health technologies that support the Hospital at Home (HaH) model, considered in a new review article published in late February in npj Digital Medicine, The hospital at home in the USA: current status and future prospects. Clinicians from Scripps Research and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine collaborated on this work, calling out the relatively fast adoption of HaH programs during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. In some parts of the world, such as Australia and Norway, “in-person at-home

Target announced that the retail chain would grow its aisles of wellness-oriented products by at least 1,000 SKUs. The products will span the store’s large footprint, going beyond health and beauty reaching into fashion, food, home hygiene and fitness. The title of the company’s press release about the program also included the fact that many of the products would be priced as low as $1.99. So financial wellness is also baked into the Target strategy. Globally, the wellness market is valued at a whopping $1.8 trillion according to a report published last week by McKinsey. McKinsey points to five trends

If it’s January, it’s Davos-time — that is the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum convening global experts and passionistas focused on big ideas and challenges facing us mere humans living on Planet Earth. Parallel with the WEF is the annual publication of the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer, now in its 24th year, focusing on global citizens’ concerns that unite people around the world. For the 2024 study, Edelman’s team fielded the survey in November 2023, collecting input from over 32,000 people living in 28 countries. About 1,150 interviews (plus or minus) were done in each nation which included

2023 was a pretty lackluster year for consumers’ spending on technology: inflation, concerns  about global instability, and general household economic ennui caused consumers to ration spending on most electronic gadgets last year. Enter a more cash-positive mood for many consumers keener in the new year to acquire updated and upgraded tech, from computer hardware to wearable tech for health, according to the forecast released by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) research team. The study results, announced on the first of two pre-conference Media Days, kicks off CES 2024 convening this week in Las Vegas. The bullish spending statistics reverse a two-year

In the company’s 17th annual look into consumers’ “life trends,” Accenture finds that, top-line, “The harmony between people, tech and business is showing tensions, and society is in flux.” And these consumer-facing trends will also shape peoples’ attitudes about their health care, how they access and pay for it, and what kinds of services and support health consumers will expect in this era of “deconstruction.”           Taken together, the trends noted in Accenture’s 2024 report on Life Trends finds that one-half of consumers, globally, are changing their life goals, making their jobs and retirement stability more important than

Discrimination in health care is reported by more people in the U.S. than in Germany, Spain, or the U.K., we learn in the research reported in The Intersection of Health Equity in Communities & Business Strategy: A Call-to-Action, from Omnicomm PR Group (OPRG) and Atlantic Insights.                          The study was conducted among 6,000 people living in Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, fielding 1,500 interviews in each of the four countries in March 2023. The U.S. survey sample included 375 people identifying as Black, White, Hispanic, or

“Generative AI already has the power to alleviate some of providers’ biggest woes, which include rising costs and high inflation, clinician shortages, and physician burnout,” Bain & Company observe in Beyond Hype: Getting the Most Out of Generative AI in Healthcare Today. By the end of this paper, the Bain team expects that those health care leaders who are investing in generative AI today (to start small, to win big in the report’s words) will learn key lessons that will put them “on a path to eventually revolutionize their businesses.” Bain & Company surveyed U.S. health system leaders to gauge their

The technologies that will drive the Fourth Industrial Revolution have health baked into most of them, based on the Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2023, a flagship report from the World Economic Forum,                   Two of the ten technologies making up this forecast directly speak to health and health care” AI-facilitated healthcare, and The metaverse for mental health. But seven of the remaining eight all address health somewhere in their discussions, and even the tenth non-obvious tech — #3, sustainable aviation fuel — would resonate with many researchers working on the opportunity

If your organization serves health consumers, patients, and caregivers, and you’re asking them to spend money on your services or products, then you’ll do well to be clear on your values and sense of purpose. In the latest Ipsos look into the future of “Purpose,” we find that consumers look most to health and pharmacy companies for shared values, compared with other industries people patronize such as food and grocery, technology and banks.                   To understand where Ipsos is coming from on this aspect of ESG, we’ll start with their territory map

“Tom Lawry reminds us that the health care industry can shift from glacial to warp speed when it needs to. Given the right tools, we can evolve from health systems to systems of health, baked with Responsible Intelligence to do good while embedded with respect, inclusion, and transparency. Health citizens deserve Tom’s vision to emerge,” I wrote in a quote on the back of Tom’s new book, Hacking Health Care: How AI and the Intelligence Revolution Will Reboot an Ailing System.                 Tom knows whereof he speaks and writes and opines: he has

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed long-systemic health disparities in the U.S. and in other parts of the world. Income inequality, sickly environments in homes and communities (think unclean air and water), lack of public transportation and nutritious food deserts combine to limit peoples’ health and well-being., Beyond the traditional social determinants of health, such as these, we’ve called out another health risk that became crucial for life in the coronavirus pandemic era: digital connectivity, Indeed, WiFi and broadband represent the newest social determinant of health to add to a growing list of risk factors that challenge health citizens’ health. Kudos to

There is no doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic motivated health care providers, payers, and patients to adopt digital tools and contact-less services, allowing people to deliver and receive medical care. Still, 18 months into the pandemic, now endemic and in its fourth wave of cases spiking around the world and in many parts of the U.S., some aspects of “digital transformation” seem not to have fully transformed American healthcare, we learn in HIMSS’s annual 2021 State of Healthcare Report. HIMSS collaborated with the organizations Trust  Accenture, The Chartix Group, and ZS on this year’s research. Nine in ten clinicians have recommended

Artificial intelligence (AI) has begun to play a role in health care for predictive analytics, personalization, and public health. On 26th January, I’ll moderate a tweetchat at 1 pm Eastern time, brainstorming the current and future state of and opportunities for AI in health care. I’ll be co-chatting with Microsoft’s AI leader, Tom Lawry (@TCLawry on Twitter). In advance of that discussion, I wanted to feature remarks shared by Brad Smith, Microsoft President, that I recently heard at CES 2021, the annual (this year, virtual) meeting convening the largest community of consumer electronics stakeholders globally Smith wove a crucial, impactful

By April 2020, over one million Medicare members were receiving health care via telemedicine. The graph here shows you the hockey-stick growth for virtual care use by older Americans into the second month of the coronavirus pandemic. The COVID-19 public health crisis up-ended all aspects of daily living in America for people of all ages. For older Americans, avoiding the risk of contracting the tricky virus in public, and especially, in health care settings, became Job 1. The pandemic thus nudged older people toward adopting digital lifestyles for daily life, for shopping, for praying, and indeed, for health care. Laurie

Millions of dollars and developers’ time have been invested in conceiving and making digital health tools. Yet with that bullish supply side of digital health,  there was a marked decline in peoples’ use of them in the past two years, found by Accenture in their latest health consumer survey, Digital is Transforming Health, So Why is Consumer Adoption Stalling? Use of mobile apps to track personal health activity fell from nearly 1 in 2 consumers to 1 in 3. Use of wearable tech nearly halved, from 33% to 18%, between 2018 and 2020. Some, but not necessarily a majority, of

Patients are now front-line payors in the U.S. health care system. As such, American health consumers are wrestling with sticker shock from surgical procedures, surprise medical bills weeks after leaving the hospital, and the cost of prescription drugs — whether six-figure oncology therapies or essential medicines like insulin and EpiPens. To manage personal health finances, patients-as-payors are increasingly willing to face trade-offs and change personal behaviors to lower health care costs, based on research in The Future of Health Care Study from USC’s Center for the Digital Future. The Center analyzed the perspectives of 1,000 U.S. adults in August 2019 regarding

Economic development has historically built trust among nations’ citizens. But in developed, wealthier parts of the world, like the U.S., “a record number of countries are experiencing an all-time high ‘mass-class’ trust divide,” according to the 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer. For 20 years, Edelman has released its annual Trust Barometer every year at the World Economic Forum in Davos, recognizing the importance of trust in the global economy and society. Last year, it was the employer who was the most-trusted touch-point in citizens’ lives the world over, I discussed in Health Populi one year ago. This year, even our employers can’t

There’s less talk about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency at #CES2020. The most important currency under discussion is Trust. We have begun a consumer electronics migration from the past decade of the Internet of Things to this next decade of the Intelligence of Things. The different “I’s” signal the transition from devices that have connected to the Internet and generated data from our everyday lives, to the next ten years of gathering that data, mashing it up for meaning, and feeding back intelligence to users in the form of advising, coaching, nudging — with potentially powerful feedback loops for health, wellness and

As technology continues to re-shape consumers’ experiences and expectations with health/care, retail, travel and work, peoples’ concerns about data privacy are also growing as observed by a 2020 consumer trends forecast from GlobalWebIndex, Connecting the dots. First, some overall context to the study. GlobalWebIndex “connects the dots” of consumers trends in 2020 including the topics shown in the first graphic including commerce and retail, gaming, travel, human touch, nostalgia, privacy and digital health — the first of these trends discussed in the report. Note that the data discussed in this post include responses from consumers residing in both the U.S.

“Listen to your patient; he is telling you the diagnosis,” Dr. William Osler is quoted to have said around the turn of the 20th century. Dr. Osler had been a strong advocate for the physician-patient conversation to inform the doctor’s diagnostic acumen and improve patient outcomes. This year is the centennial of Dr. Osler’s passing, so it’s especially timely that I introduce this post with his legendary assertion in the context of kicking off the 2019 Medecision Liberation conference. This meeting convenes the company’s clients, partners, and staff to share best practices, spark insights and learnings, and enable networking between

A “one layered delivery network through which patients can move seamlessly as they age and their needs evolve” will be the new health care platform to meet patients’ demands by 2030, according to a forecast from KPMG’s Healthcare and Life Sciences Institute. In Healthcare 2030: The consumer at the center, the KPMG team explores the demographic shifts and market drivers that will challenge the health care industry in the current U.S. delivery and financing system. The lens on that 2030 future is a consumer-centric delivery model that KPMG believes will be a solution to dealing with a demographic divide between

Social, mobile, analytics and the cloud now underpin the health care industry. We’ve been SMAC’ed, and Accenture’s Digital Health Tech Vision 2019 believes we’re in a post-digital era ripe with opportunity. Five trends comprise the Vision: DARQ Power, the acronym for Distributed ledger technology, Artificial intelligence (AI), extended Reality, and Quantum computing. Adopting these applications can help health care reduce costs, drive labor efficiency and support people-centered design and experience. Get to Know Me is the use of technology to develop and deepen relationships with people. As an example of this trend, Accenture points to Mindstrong which leverages AI and

“The Fourth Industrial Age,” Dr. Abraham Verghese writes, “has great potential to help, but also to harm, to exaggerate the profound gap that already exists between those who have much and those who have less each passing year.” Dr. Verghese asserts this in his forward to Deep Medicine, Dr. Eric Topol’s latest work which explores the promise of artificial intelligence (AI), Big Data, and robotics — three legs of the Fourth Industrial Age stool. [If you don’t know the work of Dr. Verghese, and since you’re reading the Health Populi blog, you must get to know Dr. V now. Your

“The promise of AI is undeniable…could AI help clinicians deliver better and more humanistic care?” This question is asked and answered in a JAMA viewpoint published January 1/8 2019 titled, Humanizing Artificial Intelligence. This theme motivated a conversation held over a dinner convened by Philips hosted by Frans Van Houten this week at HIMSS19. To provide context Geoff Colvin, Fortune‘s Senior Editor, first talked about taking friction out of industries, as Lyft and Uber have done in the transport sector. “Taking friction out of industries challenges and changes business models,” Geoff noted. With Uber’s IPO valuation approaching $100 billion, I’d say that’s

There’s a shortage of medical providers in the United Kingdom, a nation where healthcare is guaranteed to all Britons via the most beloved institution in the nation: The National Health Service. The NHS celebrated its 70th anniversary in July this year. The NHS “supply shortage” is a result of financial cuts to both social care and public health. These have negatively impacted older people and care for people at home in Great Britain. This article in the BMJ published earlier this year called for increasing these investments to ensure further erosion of population and public health outcomes, and to prevent

When it comes to healthcare costs, lines that decline over time are generally seen as good news. That’s how media outlets will cover the top-line of PwC’s report Medical cost trend: Behind the numbers 2019. However, there are other forces underneath the stable-looking 6.0% medical trend growth projected for 2019 that will impact healthcare providers, insurers, and suppliers to the industry. There’s this macro-health economic story, and then there’s the micro-economics of healthcare for the household. Simply put: the impact of growing financial risk for healthcare costs will be felt by patients/consumers themselves. I’ve curated the four charts from the

“Do no harm” has been the professional and ethical mantra of physicians since the Hippocratic Oath was first uttered by medical students. The origins of that three-word objective probably came out of Hippocrates’ Corpus, which included a few additional words: “to do good or to do no harm.” The proliferation and evolution of digital technologies in health care have the potential to do good or harm, depending on their application. Doing good and abstaining from doing harm can engender trust between patients, providers, and other stakeholders in health. Trust has become a key currency in provider/patient/supplier relationships: 94% of health executives

Digital health innovations were fast-proliferating at CES 2017. The bad news is there are so many of them, it’s dizzying and fragmented. The good news is that there are emerging health data ecosystems that will streamline consumers’ user experience so that people can derive knowledge, actionable advice and value out of using these tools. Walking miles of aisles in the Sands Convention Center in the first week of January 2017 can be a dizzying prospect, with hype and best-faces-forward in every single exhibitor at the show. In the health segment at CES, there’s a long list of digital tools to