A blog covering the health/care ecosystem and people.

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.

For health care, AI can benefit diagnosis and clinical care, address paperwork and bureaucratic duplication and waste, accelerate scientific research, and personalize health care direct-to-patients and -caregivers. On the downside, risks of AI in health care can involve incomplete or false diagnoses, inaccuracies and errors in cleaning up paperwork, exacerbate differential access to scientific knowledge, and exacerbate health disparities, explained in the World Health Organization’s (WHO) report, Ethics and governance of artificial intelligence for health.             WHO has released guidance on the use of large multi-modal models (LMMs) in health care which detail 40+ recommendations for

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

“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

People are sick of being sick, the New York Times tells us. “Which virus is it?” the title of the article updating the winter 2022-23 sick-season asked. Entering 2023, U.S. health citizens face physical, financial, and mental health challenges of a syndemic, inflation, and stress – all of which will shape peoples’ demand side for health care and digital technology, and a supply side of providers challenged by tech-enabled organizations with design and data chops. Start with pandemic ennui The universal state of well-being among us mere humans is pandemic ennui: call it languishing (as opposed to flourishing), burnout, or

“Big Tech has the capability to disrupt healthcare, though the complexity of healthcare ecosystems is not making it easy for these companies,” according to Big Tech & Digital Health, a detailed update from HealthXL published last week.           The pace of activity among Big Tech companies partnering with, investing in, and acquiring health technology and provider organizations has been dizzying, accelerating in and beyond the pandemic. This report profiles the current state and prospects for so-called “Big Tech” companies in the broad health/care ecosystem. For context, “Big Tech” in this report covers activity among eight companies

“Tech giants are the primary forces driving digital transformation forward,” and this is especially the case for health care systems re-imagining how health care services are delivered and “consumed.”           This observation comes from a new report, Tech Giants in Healthcare, written by four European-based experts in healthcare and bioethics. The 200-page paper details the activities of sixteen global technology companies in the health/care ecosystem, followed by a so-called “ethical analysis” of these companies’ work with health data. The report was published in Germany by Bertelsmann Stiftung, a not-for-profit think tank addressing broad  political, social and

With the collective pandemic-era pivot of people working from home, remote schooling at home, repurposing our homes for entertainment and fitness, and showing off home-baked goods on Instagram, has consumers’ comfort with new technologies accelerated? Morning Consult assessed this question in a poll timed to coincide with CES 2022, the annual conference dedicated to innovations in consumer electronics. “Is the public ready for the innovations coming out of the 2022 Consumer Electronics Show?” the Morning Consult team asked. “While brands may enjoy the initial buzz over these launches, it often takes a while for the public to become comfortable enough

“More than a year and a half into the COVID-19 outbreak, the recent spread of the highly transmissible delta variant in the United States has extended severe financial and health problems in the lives of many households across the country — disproportionately impacting people of color and people with low income,” reports Household Experiences in America During the Delta Variant Outbreak, a new analysis from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, NPR, and the Harvard Chan School of Public Health. As the HLTH conference convenes over 6,000 digital health innovators live, in person, in Boston in the wake of the delta

“Shouldn’t we, as a society, demand a nutrition label on our algorithms?” asked Dr. John Halamka. Dr. Halamka, President of the Mayo Clinic Platform, was speaking at the HIMSS 2021 annual conference on the meeting’s digital channel. Artificial intelligence and health equity were two key themes discussed during #HIMSS21, and Dr. Halamka’s concerns echoed through the week-long event. To illustrate the need for a healthier approach to AI, he offered this scenario: “If I use a data set of one million Scandinavian Lutherans to create the most amazing EKG algorithm ever and then we decide to use it in Spain,

“Most Americans clearly recognize the potential benefits that improved health IT can offer, and they want this transformation of the health care system to continue,” the Pew Charitable Trusts research concludes in Most Americans Want to Share and Access More Digital Health Data. The Pew team surveyed 1,213 adults ages 18 and over in June and July 2020, interviewing in English and Spanish. As digital health industry stakeholders will be convening at the 2021 annual HIMSS conference in Las Vegas and digitally, this report is well-timed to give us a level-set on just “where” U.S. health citizens are with respect to

The hearts and minds of nurses are fertile and inspirational sources and engines for health care innovation. This past weekend, and for the second time, I had the privilege and opportunity to be a panelist for the perennial hackathon meet-up of Nurse Hack 4 Health, sponsored by Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, Sonsiel, and DevUp. This round, the hackathon attracted hundreds of nurses from at least 20 countries and 30 U.S. states. Even a few students attended, a growing trend as academia recognizes the shortage of workers trained to solve thorny problems of the world. In health care, right here, right

In 2021, racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare are a top patient safety issue, according to ECRI’s annual list of major concerns facing healthcare consumers’ risks to adverse events that can harm them. ECRI has published their annual Top 10 list since 2018, when the list featured diagnostic errors, o behavioral health needs in acute care settings, and patient engagement and health literacy — all of which play into this year’s #1 issue, racial and ethnic disparities in health care. In fact, among the risks in this year’s Top Ten list, eight were accelerated and highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic

The coronavirus pandemic accelerated digital transformation of organizations, including health care providers. But another patient side-effect of COVID-19 has been the digital transformation of many patients, documented by data gathered by Rock Health and Stanford Center for Digital Health and analyzed in their latest report explaining how the public health crisis accelerated digital health “beyond its years,” noted in the title of the report. Rock Health and Stanford commissioned an online survey among 7,980 U.S. adults from early September to early October 2020 to gauge peoples’ interest in and utilization of digital health tools and telehealth. Rock Health has conducted a consumer digital

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

Citizens around the world unite around the concept that Trust is Dead. This is no truer than in the U.S., where trust in every type of organization and expert has plummeted in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, political and social strife, and an economic downturn. Welcome to the sobering 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer, released this week as the world’s technology innovators and analysts are convening at CES 2021, and the annual JP Morgan Healthcare meetup virtually convened. As the World Economic Forum succinctly put the situation, “2020 was the year of two equally destructive viruses: the pandemic and the

In the 2018 mid-term elections, U.S. voters were driven to polls with health care on their minds. The key issues for health care voters were costs (for care and prescription drugs) and access (read: protecting pre-existing conditions and expanding Medicaid). Issue #2 for 2018 voters was the economy. In 2020, as voting commences in-person tomorrow on 3rd November, U.S. voters have lives and livelihoods on their minds. It’s the pandemic – our physical lives looming largest in the polls – coupled with our fiscal and financial lives. Health is translating across all definitions for U.S. voters in November 2020: for

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

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

Next week, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) will convene CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, where over 180,000 tech-minded people from around the world will convene to kick the tires on new TVs, games, smart home devices, 5G connections, 3-D printing, drones, and to be sure, digital health innovations. At #CES2020, exhibitors in the health/care ecosystem will go well beyond wearable devices for tracking steps and heart rate. I’ll be meeting with wearable tech innovators along with consumer electronics companies and retailers. I’ve also scheduled get-togethers with pharma and life science folks, health plan people, and execs from consumer health companies.

Patients searching online for health information and health care provider reviews is mainstream in 2019.  Digital health tracking is now adopted by 4 in 10 U.S. consumers. Rock Health’s Digital Health Consumer Adoption Report for 2019 was developed in collaboration with the Stanford Medicine Center for Digital Health. Rock Health’s research has tracked peoples’ use of telemedicine, wearable technology, digital health tracking, and online health information since 2015, and the results this round show relative flattening of adoption across these various tools. Rock Health’s top-line findings were that: Patient-generated health data creates opportunity, and potential challenges Online health information is

“Every company is a tech company,” Christopher Mimms asserted in the Wall Street Journal in December 2018. Connectivity, artificial intelligence, and automation are now competencies every company must master, Mimms explains. This ethos underpins Humana’s decision to join CTA, the Consumer Technology Association which hosts CES every January in Las Vegas. If you read this blog, you know one of the fastest-growing “aisles” at the annual conference is digital health. Humana joined up with CTA’s Health and Fitness Technology Division this month. Last year, Humana hired Heather Cox in the new post of Chief Digital Health and Analytics Officer, reporting directly

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

By Susannah Fox, Jane Sarasohn-Kahn and Lisa Suennen I’ve lived long enough to have learned The closer you get to the fire the more you get burned But that won’t happen to us Cause it’s always been a matter of trust           A Matter of Trust, by Billy Joel If you’re in health care and don’t live under a rock, you have probably heard that United Health Group (UHG) has acquired PatientsLikeMe (PLM).  After the announcement, there was a lot of sound and fury, some of which signified nothing, as the saying goes, and some which signified a lot.

The supply side of digital health tools and tech is growing at a hockey-stick pace. There are mobile apps and remote health monitors, digital therapeutics and wearable tech from head-to-toe. Today in America, electronic health records (EHRs) are implemented in most physician offices and virtually all hospitals. Chapter 5 of my book, HealthConsuming: From Health Consumer to Health Citizen, details the promise of digital health: wearable, shareable and virtual. Today, we can also call on Alexa to remind us to take medications, play nostalgic music when we are lonely, check our physical activity status with Fitbit, and query WebMD about

We are all Homo informaticus these days, multi-channel, multi-platform beings using digital platforms. “Computing is not about computers anymore. It is about living,” Nicholas Negroponte wrote in Being Digital. He said that in 1995. In that quarter-century since Negroponte made that prescient observation, we come to better understand that being a Digital Society has its upsides and downfalls, alike. We need a “new needs model” for the digital age, asserts a new report, Human Needs in a Digital World, the 2019 Digital Society Index report from the Dentsu Aegis network. Taking Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as a basic construct, the Index

As more of our “things” get digitally connected, there’s an unanswered question about how our connected lives impact human life and health. A new report from the OECD asks and answers: How’s Life in the Digital Age? Opportunities and Risks of the Digital Transformation for People’s Well-being. This research is part of OECD’s ongoing series asking the Big Question, “How’s Life?” A prevailing current mantra in work and daily living is “digital transformation.” The OECD broadly defined the phrase in their 2017 paper on the topic as follows: Mobility, cloud computing, the Internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and big

As #CES2019 kicks off in Las Vegas with today’s first Media Day, the Consumer Technology Association presented its forecast on the 5 Technology Trends to Watch in 2019 — and they all play into health, wellness, and medical care. The five trends are: Artificial Intelligence on the Rise Envisioning the Smart Home of the Future Digital Health Tech Empowers Patients Esports and Sports Technology, and Smart Cities Promote Resilience. Here are how these five mega-trends can bolster our health and healthcare products and services over the next decade. AI is indeed on-the-rise in healthcare: as I have begun planning my agenda for

The future of healthcare is not about being sick, Prof. Dr. Koen Kas believes. Having spent many years in life sciences in both research and as an entrepreneur, Koen now knows that getting and staying healthy isn’t about just developing medicines and med-tech: optimally, health requires a tincture of delight, Koen advises in his breakthrough, innovative book, Your Guide to Delight. Healthcare must go beyond traditional user-centered design, Koen’s experience has shown, and aspire toward design-to-delight. The concept of “delight” in healthcare, such as we experience in hospitality, grocery stores, and entertainment, is elusive. I’ve observed this, too, in my

While Amazon and Google get lots of positive PR and media attention as major healthcare industry disruptors, don’t forget about two big “W’s,” Walgreens and Walmart, in the healthcare innovator mix. I recently read The Four in which Scott Galloway explains the dominance of Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook in consumers’ everyday lives. These four tech-behemoths each have their particular designs on healthcare innovation, or disruption in the eyes of, say, Epic and Cerner working on health IT systems, or GE and IBM if you’ve been pioneers in health data or big-iron information technology. Then in the past week, the

In this moment post-Cambridge Analytica/Facebook, the launch of the GDPR, and the everyday-ness of data breaches, consumers most trust doctors for sharing personal information. I’ve mined, through my health economic lens, the U.S. data published in the insightful report, Data Privacy: What the Consumer Really Thinks, a global research study from Axciom and the Data & Marketing Association (recently acquired by the Association of National Advertisers) working with Foresight Factory. The report compares consumers’ personal views on privacy and trust in ten countries: Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, the UK, and the US. We learn that Americans

Design-thinking has come to health/care, finally, and Amy Cueva has been beating this drum for a very long time. I’m delighted to be in her collegial circle, speaking at the conference about the evolving healthcare consumer who’s financially strapped, stressed-out, and Amazon Primed for customer service. I’m blogging live while attending HXD 2018 in Cambridge, MA, the health/care design conference convened by Mad*Pow, 26th and 27th June 2018. Today was Day 1 and I want to recap my learnings and share with you. Amy, Founder and Chief Experience Office of Mad*Pow, kicked off the conference with context-setting and inspiration. Design

Doctors have a complicated relationship with electronic health records (EHRs): two-thirds of primary care providers (PCPs) see value in digital records (EHRs), but at the same time believe the technology has weakened relationships with patients, detracted from clinical effectiveness, and lack streamlined user experience. That deficiency is, in three words, lack of interoperability; that challenge has required one-half of physician-users to use work-around’s to make their EHR investments more useful. These insights come out of a survey conducted among primary care providers by The Harris Poll for Stanford Medicine, published to coincide with the medical school’s convening of the EHR

“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

There’s a potential large obstacle that could prevent the full benefits of the current go-go, bullish forecasts for artificial intelligence (AI) to help make healthcare better: a decline in consumers’ willingness to share their personal data. Along with the overall erosion of peoples’ trust in government and other institutions comes this week’s revelations about Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and the so-called Deep State. Three-fourths of Americans believe that some type of “Deep State” in the federal government exists, a new poll from Monmouth University published yesterday. I clipped the responses to three of the survey’s most relevant questions here. Not only

“Health agencies will have to become at least as sophisticated as other consumer/retail industries in analyzing a variety of data that helps uncover root causes of human behavior,” Gartner recommended in 2017. That’s because “health” is not all pre-determined by our parent-given genetics. Health is determined by many factors in our own hands, and in forces around us: physical environment, built environment, and public policy. These are the social determinants of health, but knowing them even for the N of 1 patient isn’t quite enough to help the healthcare industry move the needle on outcomes and costs. We need to

The evidence of the value of digital health tools is growing, based on research published in The Growing Value of Digital Health, from the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science. With this report, the IMS Institute ushers in the organization’s new name, IQVIA Institute (THINK: “I” for “IMS,” and “Q” for “Quintiles). This is the organization’s third report on digital health, following the original analysis from 2013, updated in 2015. Here’s my take on the 2013 report, which found that 36 mobile health apps represented one-half of all downloads. On a conference call held last week, the company’s SVP and Executive

“Helping people on their path to better health” is the mission-mantra of CVS Health. Re-branded from its previous identity as CVS/pharmacy, the organization convened a Health Innovation Summit with its vendor partners whose products fill the front-of-store shelves to empower, inspire and support consumers to manage health and wellness for themselves and their families. I was grateful for the opportunity to provide the first talk for the day, setting the context for the evolving retail health/care landscape with the consumer at the center. The consumer is, at any point in a 24-hour day: a person wearing many hats (a worker,

“What doctor?” asks the title of a PwC report on the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics in healthcare. AI and robot technology are penetrating all aspects of the macroeconomy, and they’ve begun to re-shape the health economy, as well. Underneath PwC’s titular question are two lenses: the role of the AI/robot doctor vis-a-vis the role of the human doctor. PwC identifies eight areas that AI and robotics will impact in healthcare, shown in the first diagram: Decision making Diagnosis Early detection End of life care Keeping well Research Training, and Treatment. For keeping well, AI and robotics can

It’s generally thought that healthy people are more health-engaged than people diagnosed with medical issues. But that’s old health school thinking: most health consumers managing chronic conditions say they’ve become more engaged with healthcare over the past two years, according to CDW’s 2017 Patient Engagement Perspectives Study. In 2017, 70% of patients told CDW they’d become more engaged with healthcare, up from 57% in 2016. That’s a 20% growth in the proportion of patients engaging in healthare in just one year. Growing signs of patient engagement are in people driven to access online patient portals for their personal healthcare records: People

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

In President Donald Trump’s preliminary thoughts about health care in America, the landscape would feature a mix of tax credits, health savings accounts, high-risk pool, state Medicaid block grants, and regulatory control shifting from the Federal government to the states, according to PwC’s forecast for the new year, Top health industry issues of 2017. PwC frames the 2017 top healthcare issues under the overall strategic imperative of value, with three categories: Adapting for value Innovating for value Building for value. The ten top issues that will shape U.S. healthcare for the next year, PwC expects, will be: An uncertain fate for the

This post was written to support the upcoming meeting of the PCHA, the Personal Connected Health Alliance, to be held 11-14 December 2016 at the Gaylord Hotel in greater Washington, DC. You can follow the events and social content via Twitter using the hashtag #Connect2Health. Have you visited your local Big Box, discount or consumer electronics store lately? You’ll find expanding shelf space for digital health technologies aimed squarely at consumers. 2017 promises even more of them, aimed at helping people accomplish health tasks once  performed in hospitals and by healthcare providers, or tasks not yet delivered in today’s healthcare

When a person dons a piece of wearable technology, they first look to engage with some aspect of health or fitness before they seek entertainment. To satisfy that demand side of the market equation, we’re seeing a stream of devices, platforms, and corporate strategies trying to reach the wearable tech consumer. Today, Philips announced its expanding strategy for digital health, launching devices to help people, in Philips’ words, measure, monitor, and stay motivated for personal health. The company is offering a health smartwatch, a weight scale, an ear thermometer, and two blood pressure monitors (for wrist and upper arm), all

Digital platforms and tools are fast-advancing in all industries, and especially in health and health care. But it’s people-first, and digital PLUS analog, based on Accenture’s latest forecast of five macro technology trends. The five forces are: Intelligent automation – 70% of health executives expect to invest more in artificial intelligence; Liquid workforce – 42% of health/care workers are expected to be contractors or free agents within organizations within 3 years’ Platform economy – 10x growth is expected in application programming interfaces (APIs) in the next five years, which will enable data to liquidly move across healthcare platforms Predictable disruption

This cool network map is brought to us by Onalytica, which is in the business of identifying online social network digerati — the Who’s Who of social/digital influential people across a whole range of industries. Because you’re reading Health Populi, I’m showing you their latest map of digital health influencers (which includes, humbly, me pictured around 5 o’clock on the map in the lower southeast corner). I’m number 15 with an influence score of 9.32. This pales in comparison to the top influencer, the wonderful Dr. Bertalan Mesko, MD, PhD, the medical futurist based in Hungary. @Berci is his Twitter

The first health news I read this morning in my Google Alerts was a press release explaining that Nokia planned to acquire Withings for EU170 (about $190mm). As an early adopter and devoted user of the Withings Smart Body Analyzer, I took this news quite personally. “What will Nokia be doing with my beloved Withings?” I asked myself via Twitter early this morning. As if on cue, a public relations pro with whom I’ve been collegial for many years contacted me to see if I’d like to talk with the Founder and CEO of Withings, Cédric Hutchings, and Ramzi Haidamus,

“It depends” is the hedge-phrase that characterizes how Americans see disclosing personal information versus keeping private information private, according to the consumer survey report, Privacy and Information Sharing, published by the Pew Research Center (PRC) in January 2016. U.S. adults see a privacy trade-off, living in the convenience-context of 21st century digital economy in exchange for some form of value. The “it depends” is a factor of what kind of data is geing collected, especially by third parties, how long that data area retained, for what use — vis-à-vis what a person is trading in return which could be a hard dollar