A blog covering the health/care ecosystem and people.

The clinical evidence base continues to grow making the case that art and creativity can be drivers for health and well-being — as it’s proven to me in my own life. Most recently, cases have been made by Emily Peters, documented in her book Remaking Medicine; by Robin Strongin, advocate for arts, medicine, and well-being from her base in Washington, DC; and, by my Belgium-based colleague and friend Koen Kas whose book addressing themes of art and health will soon be published. I was inspired at the convergence of art and well-being during a visit on 20 September to the

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.

On February 22, 2024, I went to a CVS Pharmacy-Inside-Target in my community to fill a prescription for benzonatate 200 mg capsules. I had caught a bad case of the flu the week before, and subsequently suffered a very long tail of a cough. That’s TMI for me to write about in the Health Populi blog, but this story has a current-events twist: the pharmacist could not electronically link with my insurance company to transact my payment. He tried a few work-flows, and ended up using a discount card which in the moment worked for us, and I paid the

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

“Businesses which have witnessed a rise in brand value…have all transcended their established category norms and play a more significant and meaningful role in society and consumers’ lives,” we learn in the Interbrand Best Global Brands 2023 report, subtitled, “How Iconic Brands Lead Across Arenas. Most brands stagnated or lost ground in terms of brand value in 2023, with average growth rate of 5.7% compared to 16% in 2022. But those who rose fast bucked the stagnation trend, and included the fastest risers Airbnb (growing brand value by 21,8%) and Microsoft (increasing in brand value by 14%, the highest growth rate

Today 11th October is National Burn Awareness Day 2023, and I’m supporting the effort for all of us to #BeBurnsAware.             I have become more bullish on Burn Awareness as I’ve come to learn more about the impact burns have on public, family, and children’s health globally. My teacher for better understanding burns and public health has been Krissie Stiles, a long-time burns nurse specialist and Ambassador to the Children’s Burns Trust in the UK. Meet Krissie. Burns are a global public health challenge, which I detailed here in Health Populi earlier this year. Today

“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 have expanded their definitions of health in 2023, with mental health supplanting physical health for the top-ranked factor in feeling healthy. Welcome to the Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: Trust and Health, released this week, with striking findings about how the economic, post-pandemic life, pollution and climate change all feed mis-trust among citizens living in 13 countries — and their eroding trust for health care systems.         While these factors vary by country in terms of relative contribution to citizen trust, note that in the U.S., social polarization plays an outsized role in factors that “make us

“Can employers afford not to care?” MetLife’s 21st annual U.S. Employee Benefit Trends Study asks and answers that question, with a resounding and evidence-based “NO.”                 I’m in Salt Lake City today discussing the drivers of health, “yesterday, today, and tomorrow” at the Virgin Pulse Thrive Summit, celebrating the ten-year anniversary of the company. As you would expect from an organization that is part of Richard Branson’s business ecosystem, the meeting will be energetically produced, delivering insights wrapped in info-taining ways. One of those features will be my being invited to create a

Most U.S. health citizens think AI is being adopted in American health care too quickly, feeling “significant discomfort…with the idea of AI being used in their own health care,” according to consumer studies from the Pew Research Center.                  The top-line is that 60% of Americans would be uncomfortable with [their health] provider relying on AI in their own care, found in a consumer poll fielded in December 2022 among over11,000 U.S. adults. Most consumers who are aware of common uses of AI know about wearable fitness trackers that can analyze exercise and sleep

An over-arching theme of the 2023 CES conference was Human Security for All, abbreviated as HS4A. And what, you might ask, do “human” and “security” have to do with the largest annual consumer technology conference, held last week in Las Vegas? Here’s what. “This is the first CES not only in the new post-pandemic or live-with-pandemic era. But this is the first time we actually had a theme. And that theme is focused on what technology can do to make the world better,” Gary Shapiro, CEO and President of the Consumer Technology Association, expressed in his opening speech for #CES2023.

You and I are ending this week looking back three days, Friday morning quarterback style, wondering how the U.S. 2022 midterm elections could impact health and health care in America. We can never know with 101% certainty the answer to this question following any U.S. election. This year’s midterms leave us especially in need of scenario planning, especially as on this day, we still do not know what the final balance of power in the U.S. Congress will be. Nor can we ascertain, just yet, what the jockeying for power within both the Democratic party and the Republican party will

“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

As health care industry stakeholders and policymakers have begun to recognize and address the underlying drivers of peoples’ health, there’s another acronym that is taking hold in health care beyond SDoH: that is ESG, standing for Environment Social, and Governance pillars of responsibility and activity.               To mark this Earth Day 2022, I’ve written a brief primer on ESG for the health care community published today in the Medecision Liberate Health blog. Here in Health Populi, I’ll give you a few highlights with graphics you won’t see in that essay to illustrate some key

Without trust, people do not engage with health care providers, health plans, or life science companies….nor do many people accept “science fact.” I explore the sad state of Trust and Health Care. published in the Medecision Liberate Health blog, with a positive and constructive call-to-action for health care industry stakeholders to consider in re-building this basic driver of well-being. That is, trust as a determinant of health. Edelman’s 2022 Trust Barometer came out in January 2022, coinciding as it annually does with the World Economic Forum’s meeting in Davos, Switzerland. Every year, WEF convenes the world’s biggest thinkers to wrestle with the

This week, public health truths have collided with social media, the infodemic, and health citizenship. First, I read in Becker’s Health IT on February 16 that the peer-reviewed policy journal Health Affairs was prevented by a social media outlet from promoting its February 2022 issue themed “Racism and Health.” The company said the topic was too controversial to feature in this moment. “Google and Twitter are blocking its paid media ads to promote the content, flagging racism as ‘sensitive content,'” Molly Gamble explained in Becker’s. I myself used the blogging platform you’re on now to promote the February ’22 issue of

“Health is the cornerstone to our core needs, thereby the cornerstone to trust.” So wrote Kirsty Graham, Global Leader of Sectors and Global Chair of Health at Edelman, in an essay explaining the 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer. If it’s January, it must be time for the World Economic Forum in Davos, the annual setting for Edelman’s launch of the company’s Trust Barometer. While WEF is mostly virtual this year due to the pandemic, Edelman has released the survey of global citizens’ views on trust in institutions right on-time and in full and sobering detail. I welcome and dig into the

“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

Before the coronavirus emerged, the top causes of death in developed countries were heart disease, cancers, diabetes, and accidents. Then COVID-19 joined the top-10 list of killers in the U.S. and the issue of pandemic preparedness for the next “Disease X” became part of global public health planning. But the biggest health threat to human life is climate change, according to a new report from the World Health Organization titled The Health Argument for Climate Action. It’s WHO’s special report on climate change and health, dedicated to the memory of Ella Kissi-Debrah — a child who died succumbing to impacts

In 2020, Genentech launched its first study into health inequities. The company spelled out their rationale to undertake this research very clearly: “Through our work pursuing groundbreaking science and developing medicines for people with life-threatening diseases, we consistently witness an underrepresentation of non-white patients in clinical research. We have understood inequities and disproportionate enrollment in clinical trials existed, but nowhere could we find if patients of color had been directly asked: ‘why?’ So, we undertook a landmark study to elevate the perspectives of these medically disenfranchised individuals and reveal how this long-standing inequity impacts their relationships with the healthcare system

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated food insecurity in the U.S., a situation that was already challenging for millions of American families before the public health crisis emerged. While several Congressional and administrative actions were implemented in 2020 and the first half of 2021, the issue of food insecurity — defined as being unable to acquire enough food due to insufficient money or resources — remains a tragic aspect of daily living for many Americans — and especially for children who live in households where jobs have been lost and incomes reduced. Nutrition security has also been a health risk where people

A majority of Democrats, Independents, and Republicans agree that nurses are underpaid. Most Americans across political parties also believe that hospital executives are overpaid, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The survey analysis is aptly titled, Most Americans Agree That Nurses and Aides Are Underpaid, While Few Support Using Federal Dollars to Increase Pay for Doctors, . Insurance executives are also overpaid, according to 73% of Americans — an even higher percent of people than the 68% saying hospital execs make too much money. In addition to nurses being underpaid, 6 in 10

“We don’t un-learn,” Dr. Amy Abernethy asserted as she shared her pandemic perspectives on a panel with 2 other former U.S. health policy and regulatory leaders. The three spoke about navigating compliance (think: regulations and reimbursement) in an uncertain world. An uncertain world is our workplace in the health/care ecosystem, globally, in this moment. So to give us some comfort in our collective foxhole, my last post for this week of immersion in #HIMSS21 is based on the keynote speech of Michael Dowling, CEO of Northwell Health. Dowling keynoted on the theme of “Leading for the Future,” sharing his lessons

COVID-19 reshaped people around the world, one-half of whom are re-defining their personal purpose and life-goals. This sense of purpose extends to peoples’ willingness to buy or patronize companies who do not meet their needs for health, safety, sustainability and trust. For example, two in three of these people would switch travel brands if they felt health and safety weren’t up to par, discovered in Life Reimagined – Mapping the motivations that matter for today’s consumers, from Accenture’s Voices of Change series. In May 2021, Accenture polled over 25,000 consumers globally, in 22 countries, and found that one-half of people

We’ve long know that “the patient” has been an under-utilized resource in the U.S. healthcare system since Dr. Charles Safran testified with that statement to Congress way back in 2004…an era where bipartisanship for health IT was a real thing. Today, with the insights of Alexandra Drane (Founder of ARCHANGELS) and Dr. Nirav Shah (of Stanford University), we know that caregivers are among the most over-utilized resources in the U.S. healthcare system — overused, over-stressed, under-paid, detailed n How Health Systems Can Care for Caregivers, published in the NEJM Catalyst July 2021 issue. In this study, Drane and Shah analyze

We want to go outside, drive our cars, shop for groceries, stay and get healthy. These are the key themes coming out of the 2021 Axios Harris Poll 100 on the most visible brands with high (and low) reputations among U.S. consumers. In the top-ranked “excellent” and “very good” brands numbered 1 through 50, we find five core health care brands that were most visible to U.S. consumers: Moderna ranked #3, Pfizer #7, CVS Health #24, Walgreens #46, and Kaiser Permanente #47. The only pure healthcare brand in the bottom 50 was Johnson & Johnson at #72, between Dollar General

Trust in the technology industry has crashed to an all-time low based on the 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer. As Richard Edelman, CEO, concisely asserted, “Tech loses its halo.” The first chart shows the one-year trend on trust across industries through U.S. consumers’ eyes. Most industries lost citizens’ trust between 2020 and 2021, most notably, Technology, dropping the greatest margin at 9 points Retail, falling 7 points, Entertainment. falling 5 points, and, Fashion and automotive declining by 4 points. Several sectors’ trust equity rose in the year, especially healthcare growing by 8 points and food and beverage rose slightly by 2

COVID-19 ushered in the era of our homes as safe havens for work, shopping, education, fitness-awaking, bread-baking, and health-making. In my latest essay written for Medecision, I weave together new and important data and evidence supporting the basic social determinant of health — shelter, housing, home — and some innovations supporting housing-as-medicine from CVS Health, UnitedHealth Group, AHIP, Brookings Institution, the Urban Land Institute, and other stakeholders learning how housing underpins our health — physical, mental, financial. Read about a wonderful development from Communidad Partners, working with the Veritas Impact Partners group, channeling telehealth to housing programs serving residents with

A year into the COVID-19 pandemic, most Americans are still in “survival mode,” according to an update of the 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer, Trust and the Coronavirus in the U.S. Updating the company’s annual Trust Barometer, Edelman conducted a new round of interviews in the U.S. among 2,500 people in early March. [For context, you can read my take on the 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer published during the World Economic Forum in January 2021 here in Health Populi].  The first chart shows that two in three people in the U.S. are still in a pandemic mindset, worried about safety and

Consumers favorite brands in 2021 are baked with health, from medical care through to the social determinants that make our wellness and mental health better, based on the 2021 Prophet Brand Relevance Index. The top ten brands in 2021 are Apple (the top brand for the sixth year in a row), Peloton, KitchenAid, Mayo Clinic, LEGO, Costco, Honda, Johns Hopkins Medicine, PlayStation, and Amazon. In this year’s study, Prophet remarked that, “Almost overnight, they’ve [consumers] reconsidered beloved names like Disney, making room for brands that serve them better…As they weather some bleak moments, consumers want brands that will commit to

The growing use of APIs in health information technology innovation for patient care has been a boon to speeding development placed in the hands of providers and patients. Using APIs can help drive interoperability and make data “liquid” and useable. APIs can enable “Data liberación,” a concept proposed by Todd Park when he worked in the Obama administration. Without securing patients’ personal health data leveraging APIs, those intimate details are highly hackable explained in All That we Let In, a report from Knight Ink and Appr0ov. It is likely that behind growing health data hacks is the marginally greater financial

The first year of the coronavirus pandemic in America was a kind of stress test on the U.S. health care system, revealing weak links and opportunities for bad behavior. “These are not just about individual instances or bad apples,” Dr. Vikas Saini, President of The Lown Institute, explained, referring to them as “cautionary tales” of the current state of U.S. health care. Dr. Saini and his colleague Shannon Brownlee released the annual Lown Institute 2020 Shkreli Awards this week, highlighting their ten most egregious examples of the worst events in U.S. health care that happened in the past year —

In numerology, the symbolic meaning behind the number “21” is death and re-birth. In tarot cards, 21 is a promise of fulfillment, triumph, and victory. How apropos that feels right now as we say goodbye and good riddance to 2020 and turn the page for a kinder, gentler, healthier New Year. It would be sinful to enter a New Year as challenging as 2021 promises to be without taking the many lessons of our 2020 pandemic life and pain into account. For health care in America, it is a time to re-build and re-imagine a better, more equitable landscape for

The coronavirus pandemic has been a shock to people across all aspects of everyday living, for older and younger people, for work and school, for entertainment and travel — all impacting our hearts, minds, and wallets. “As the bedrock of daily life was shaken, uncertainty predictably emerged as the prevailing emotion of our time but this universal problem was eliciting a highly differentiated reaction in different people,” Kern Schireson, CEO of Known, observed. His company has conducted a large quantitative and qualitative research program culminating in a first report, The Human Condition 2020: A Shock To The System. Known’s team of

As humans in the Age of the Coronavirus focus on physiological needs, people have intensely focused on hunting-and-gathering food and hygiene products. We will remember memes about toilet tissue stockpiling and re-visiting canned and shelf-stable comfort foods from childhood long after the pandemic. Some people, though, haven’t had easy access to nutritious food in their communities or the ability to engage with ecommerce platforms to order food for delivery. An alliance between ALDI, the value-priced grocer, and Instacart, was forged to address that gap as a key social determinant of health. Food-is-medicine when it comes to managing chronic conditions like

In the pandemic, I’ve been weaving together data to better understand how people as consumers are being re-shaped in daily life across their Maslow Hierarchies of Needs. One of those basic needs has been digital connectivity. People of color have faced many disparities in the wake of the pandemic: the virus itself, exacting greater rates of mortality and morbidity being the most obvious, dramatic inequity. Another has been digital inequity. Black people have had a more difficult time paying for phone and Internet connections during the COVID-19 crisis, we learned in a Morning Consult poll fielded in June 2020. In

The coronavirus pandemic added a new concept to our collective, popular lexicon: “social distancing” and “physical distancing.” This was one pillar for the public health prescription we were given to help mitigate the spread of a very tricky, contagious virus. A major negative impact of our sheltering in place, working from home, and staying indoors has been a sort of clearing out of cities where people congregate for work, for culture, for entertainment, for education, for travel and tourism…for living out our full and interesting lives and livelihoods. Intel gave Harbor Research a mandate to “re-imagine life in a post-pandemic

Most U.S. employers worry about workers’ mental health and substance use as employees begin returning to work in the summer of 2020. About 4 in 5 U.S. companies are “very concerned” or “concerned” about employees’ chronic illnesses, acute illnesses, and injuries along with behavioral health issue, based on McKinsey’s annual employer survey which coincided this year with the COVID-19 pandemic. Challenges of opioid use in the workforce remain a concern for two-thirds of U.S. companies, as well. Some 9 in 10 U.S. companies say behavioral health has a negative impact on workforce productivity. In response, 7 in 10 employers are

“Americans are feeling incredible financial pressure as a result of the COVID outbreak,” John Thompson, Chief Program Officer with the Financial Health Network. One in three people in the U.S. has skipped or stopped paying a bill, and over half of Americans have used emergency savings, according to a survey from the BlackRock Emergency Savings Initiative (ESI). BlackRock, the investment firm, allocated $50 million in February 2019 to form the ESI, focused on helping people with lower incomes to bolster savings and financial health. BlackRock partners in the ESI with the Financial Health Network, CommonWealth, the Center for Advanced Hindsight Common

The Consumer Technology Association (CTA), collaborating with industry stakeholders, has ushered in a standard for artificial intelligence in health care.   CTA is the membership organization for companies that innovate, manufacture and market consumer-facing tech like big-screen TVs, slick new autos, video games and voice assistants. So what’s an organization like CTA doing with AI and health care? Let me connect the dots. Check out this graphic taken from my book, HealthConsuming: From Health Consumer to Health Citizen. This shows the ten categories of tech I revisit each year at CES, CTA’s annual mega-conference of new-new things in consumer electronics

Across the U.S., the health/care ecosystem warmly embraced social determinants of health as a concept in 2019. A few of the mainstreaming-of-SDoH signposts in 2019 were: Cigna studying and focusing in on loneliness as a health and wellness risk factor Humana’s Bold Goal initiative targeting Medicare Advantage enrollees CVS building out an SDOH platform, collaborating with Unite US for the effort UPMC launching a social impact program focusing on SDoH, among other projects investing in social factors that bolster public health. As I pointed out in my 2020 Health Populi trendcast, the private sector is taking on more public health

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.

Today is 4th November 2019, exactly one year to the day that Americans can express their political will and cast their vote for President of the United States. Health care will be a key issue driving people to their local polling places, so it’s an opportune moment to take the temperature on U.S. voters’ perspectives on healthcare reform. This post looks at three current polls to gauge how Americans are feeling about health care reform 365 days before the 2020 election, and one day before tomorrow’s 2019 municipal and state elections. Today’s Financial Times features a poll that found two-thirds

Marc Iskowitz, Executive Editor of MM&M, warmly welcomed me to the Haymarket Media soundproof studio in New York City yesterday. We’d been trying to schedule meeting up to do a live podcast since February, and we finally got our mutual acts together on 6th August 2019. Here’s a link to the 30-minute conversation, where Marc combed through the over 500 endnotes from HealthConsuming‘s appendix to explore the patient as the new health care payor, the Amazon prime-ing of people, and prospects for social determinants of health to bolster medicines “beyond the pill.” https://www.pscp.tv/MMMnews/1eaJbvgovBYJX Thanks for listening — and if you

There are many forms of magic inspired by Disney, the company. There’s the obvious attraction, the Magic Kingdom, that was Walt’s original destination vision, “imagineered” in 1932. Then there are other kinds of magic. The one I’m deep into in the moment is inspiration, ideation, and “reimagineering” my own thinking about work, legacy, and social justice. I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to spend much of this week at the inaugural Disney Institute Women’s Leadership Summit. The Institute convened about 300 women (and a handful of brave “He-for-She” men keen on diversity) in Orlando to learn about and brainstorm

Self-care in health goes back thousands of years. Reading from Hippocrates’ Corpus about food and clean air’s role in health sounds contemporary today. And even in our most cynical moments, we can all hearken back to our grandmothers’ kitchen table wisdom for dealing with skin issues, the flu, and broken hearts. The annual conference of the Consumer Healthcare Products Association (CHPA) convened this week, and I was grateful to attend and speak on the evolving retail health landscape yesterday. Gary Downing, CEO of Clarion Brands and Chairman of the CHPA Board, kicked off the first day with a nostalgic look