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Mary Meeker on Healthcare in 2018: Connectivity, Consumerization, and Costs

  Health care features prominently in the nearly-300 slides curated by Mary Meeker in her always- informative report on Internet Trends 2018.  Meeker, of Kleiner Perkins, released the report as usual at the Code Conference, held this year on 30 May 2018 in Silicon Valley. I’ve mined Meeker’s report for several years here on Health Populi: 2017 – Digital healthcare at the inflection point, via Mary Meeker 2015 – Musings with Mary Meeker on the digital/health nexus 2014 – Healthcare at an inflection point: digital trends via Mary Meeker 2013 – The role of internet technologies in reducing healthcare costs – Meeker

 

How to Make Healthcare More Intelligent and Trustworthy: Accenture’s Digital Health Tech Vision 2018

“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

 

Think Like a LEGO Builder in Healthcare – Considering PwC’s New Health Economy Vision

Expect “new combinations” of industry actors and technologies to reorganize and re-imagine healthcare, with an eye on both price and investments in customer experience (CX), PwC envisions in their latest report on The New Health Economy in the Age of Disruption. In this vision, healthcare will be a more flexible marketplace underpinned by data, platforms, and workers. Yes, it’s challenging to get from here-to-there, but PwC explains just how this can happen. Four archetypes, models, of healthcare deals have begun to emerge in the marketplace, illustrated by the Big Deals and announcements reshaping the industry in the past couple of years:

 

Food as Medicine – Philips’ Take On An Apple A Day from the Rijksmuseum

What if you went to visit a Vermeer still life with fruit, vegetables, and flowers, and the only image you saw in the famous painting was the flower and an urn? What if you heard the sounds of a juicing machine whirring as you reflected on a Rembrandt? That’s exactly what happened to museum-goers visiting Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. These art patrons witnessed a museum guard literally pulling an apple out of a painting, to leave a barren portrait of an urn and little else. Roll over, Anthony Oberman, the artist of “Still Life with Fruit in a Terracotta Dish,” one of

 

Re-Imagining Healthcare – a Lesson from Von Clausewitz in the Fog of War

When you’re on the battlefield and you can’t see what lies ahead, go high, recommended General Von Clausewitz in his book, On War. I paraphrase this prescription from the good General-strategist’s book, On War — “War is the realm of uncertainty; three-quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty. A sensitive and discriminating judgment is called for; a skilled intelligence to scent out the truth.” Governor Mark Leavitt, who held the post of Secretary of Health and Human Services under President Bush, offered this advice at the recent Liberation

 

Using Design to Liberate Healthcare; Learning from Dr. Andrew Chacko and Tan Le

This is the second post of three written to summarize what I learned participating in Medecision’s annual meeting with the company’s partners, held March 27-29, 2018 at the Ritz-Carlton in Dallas, TX.  I concluded the first of this three-part series with Dr. Don Rucker’s belief that, “Patients are the massive use-case for interoperability.” This second post focuses on the key role of designing for healthcare – for patients, caregivers, providers, all industry sector workers indeed. And designing information to make it beautiful, useable, meaningful. You’ll read about Renaissance Man/Doctor Andrew Chacko MD, a board-certified physician, French and Physics student at the Naval

 

Food as Medicine Update: Danone Goes B-Corp, Once Upon a Farm Garners Garner, and Livongo Buys Retrofit

As the nation battles an obesity epidemic that adds $$ costs to U.S. national health spending, there are many opportunities to address this impactful social determinant of health to reduce health spending per person and to drive public and individual health. In this post, I examine a few very current events in the food-as-medicine marketspace. Big Food as an industry gets a bad rap, as Big Tobacco and Big Oil have had. In the case of Big Food, the public health critique points to processed foods, those of high sugar content (especially when cleverly marketed to children), and sustainability. But

 

Livongo and Cambia Allying to Address Chronic Disease Burden and Scale Solutions to Consumers

Chronic diseases are what kill most people in the world. In the U.S., the chronic disease burden takes a massive toll on both public health and mortality, accounting for 7 in 10 deaths in America each year. That personal health toll comes at a high price and proportion of national health expenditures. A new alliance between Livongo and Cambia Health seeks to address that challenge, beginning with diabetes and scaling to other chronic conditions. Livongo has proven out the Livongo for Diabetes program, which has demonstrated positive outcomes in terms of patient satisfaction and cost-savings. The plan with Cambia is

 

Nudging Patients to Use EHRs: Moving Toward a Tipping Point for Consumer Health IT

Half of U.S. patients were offered online access to their health records by providers or insurers, and one-half of them accessed the EHR at least once in the last year.  One in four of those offered online EHR access looked at them more than 3 times. It takes a good nudge from a provider to motivate a patient to access online medical records, found by ONC in their latest research into consumers’ use of EHRs detailed in Individuals’ use of online medical records and technology for health needs, the ONC Data Brief No. 40, published April 2018. he concept of

 

What Would Healthcare Feel Like If It Acted Like Supermarkets – the 2018 Temkin Experience Ratings

U.S. consumers rank supermarkets, fast food chains, retailers, and banks as their top performing industries for experience according to the 2018 Temkin Experience Ratings. Peoples’ experience with health plans rank at the bottom of the roster, on par with rental cars and TV/Internet service providers. If there is any good news for health plans in this year’s Temkin Experience Ratings compared to the 2017 results, it’s at the margin of “very poor” performance: last year, health plans has the worst performance of any industry (with the bar to the furthest point on the left as “low scoring”). This year, it

 

Please Stop Hating on Amazon, Mr. President. It’s Americans’ Favorite Brand.

The most beloved company in America is Amazon, according to the 2018 Harris Poll Reputation Quotient Rankings which were published on 22nd March 2018. This was the third year in a row that Amazon garnered the top position in this corporate reputation poll, which gauges consumers’ views on workplace environment, social responsibility, emotional appeal, financial performance, vision and leadership, and products and services. Mr. President, why pick on Americans’ favorite brand? The brand defines the 2018 consumer’s benchmark for a best-retail experience, which is what people increasingly expect across the various interactions they have throughout a day. [As a sidebar,

 

FemTech is Hot, and Fitbit Knows It

Girls Rule the World, Beyoncé has told us. But not when it comes to digital health…at least until 2018, as Fitbit has announced a woman-focused smartwatch called the Versa which is expected to hit the market in April 2018. The waterproof Versa will measure heart rate, do the usual fitness tracking metrics, and enable women to track their menstrual cycle. Fitbit has been quite clear that the device isn’t for conception or contraception. The watch will be priced at $199 at retail, a much lower price-point than the Apple Watch at $329. So here Fitbit also has an argument for

 

Wearable, Shareable, Virtual: The Demands of the Digital Health Consumer in 2018

As I wrote here in April 2017, telehealth and virtual healthcare are mainstreaming. This week at the 2018 annual HIMSS conference, telehealth is playing a mainstream role in discussions about right-sizing and right-placing healthcare.     The evidence for telehealth’s tipping point is rooted in new research published today by Accenture on Patients + Doctors + Machines, Accentures’ 2018 Consumer Survey on Digital Health. I sat down today with Dr. Kaveh Safavi who leads Accenture’s healthcare practice to discuss the results of this study into peoples’ atttudes toward healthcare technology and innovation. Three in four consumers in America say technology is

 

Collaboration is the New Innovation – Designing for Health with Amy Cueva at #HIMSS18

“It’s not about shiny new technologies but about designing relationships to truly impact the patient at the center of the disconnected ecosystem,” asserted Amy Cueva, Founder and CXO of the design consultancy Mad*Pow. That patient is a consumer, a caregiver; it’s you and me, Cueva explained. To reconnect the fragmented pieces of healthcare delivery, Cueva said, mantra-style, “collaboration is the new innovation.” And collaboration with patients, caregivers — the people for whom that healthcare is aimed — is the optimal workflow for effectively, enchantingly designing healthcare. In a talk she delivered at the Innovation Summit in a preconference meet-up at the annual

 

What the Latest Pew Consumer Data Means for #HIMSS18

The median American uses 3 social networking platforms in 2018. Facebook is the primary platform for most Americans who use social media in 2018: two-thirds of U.S. adults use Facebook, and 3 in 4 of them check in on a daily basis. But in the past year, the percentage of people using Facebook and its corporate sister YouTube has flattened, based on the survey report, Social Media Use in 2018 from the Pew Research Center. The Pew team researched U.S. adults’ use of social media across eight popular platforms.     Instagram has gained consumer favor over the past two years,

 

How One Hospital System Baked Love Into Their Health App

On July 18, 2017, Neil Gomes, Chief Digital Officer at Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health in Philadelphia, tweeted this: When I saw this tweet, I was especially struck by Gomes’s phrase, “Designed & developed with heart/love by my @DICEGRP.” That’s Jefferson’s health solutions group that focuses on digital innovation and consumer experience. Here’s a health system that’s focused on that customer experience, which has become a critical success factor for healthcare to thrive. That’s because, as Steve Laughlin, VP and General Manager of IBM’s Global Consumer Group recently explained to me, a consumer’s last great customer experience becomes the

 

Add Behavioral Data to Social Determinants For Better Patient Understanding

“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

 

Building Trust and Truth in Patient Social Networks

We are only just past the dawn of the second machine age, where digitization is enabling artificial intelligence. “Our new tools are destroying both trust and truth, creating a hunger for community and authenticity. We crave actual physical connection to neighbours, colleagues, and fellow townspeople, even if digitally facilitated.”  Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote this in a column I read this morning in the Financial Times titled, “Our struggle with technology to protect trust and truth.” Trust and truth underpin health engagement, we learned in the first Edelman Health Engagement Barometer launched ten years ago. Those were the early days of the formation

 

Consumer Health and Patient Engagement – Are We There Yet?

Along with artificial intelligence, patient engagement feels like the new black in health care right now. Perhaps that’s because we’re just two weeks out from the annual HIMSS Conference which will convene thousands of health IT wonks, users and developers (I am the former), but I’ve received several reports this week speaking to health engagement and technology that are worth some trend-weaving. As my colleague-friends Gregg Masters of Health Innovation Media (@2healthguru) and John Moore of Chilmark Research (@john_chilmark)  challenged me on Twitter earlier this week: are we scaling sustained, real patient engagement and empowerment yet? Let’s dive into the

 

#Engage4Health: How Patients Are Morphing Into Healthcare Consumers, for #HIMSS18

This blog appears today as part of a #HIMSS18 primer series for attendees, and the industry at large, to discuss major health IT issues that will help move health and healthcare delivery forward in 2018 – and beyond. I’m grateful to HIMSS to be one of 20 Social Media Ambassadors appointed for this year’s conference, which convenes in Las Vegas at the Sands Expo Center from March 5 to 9th, 2018.  Prioritizing the patient-as-consumer through my health economic lens, the biggest priorities will be: Engaging patients in self-care and driving health and health plan literacy to better manage constrained access

 

When Buying a Pair of Jeans Competes With Filling a Prescription at CVS in Target

Stories about three fashion brands have me thinking about women and their health economics. Stay with me. Target unveiled its new line of clothing, Universal Thread, which features pieces that are accessible to women who may be dealing with physical limitations or sensory challenges. I first read about Universal Thread on The Mighty website, which is a community of over 1 million people interested in connecting on health and disabilities. As The Mighty described, the brand Universal Thread, “is centered around denim since it is a staple in many women’s wardrobes, but denim can be uncomfortable for many people with disabilities

 

Getting Real About Social Determinants of Health

New research points out that real people live real lives, and our assumptions about social determinants of health (SDOH) may need to be better informed by those real lives. I read three reports in the past week sobering up my bullish #SDOH ethos dealing with food deserts, transportation, and health service access — three key social determinants of health. To remind you about the social determinants, here’s a graphic from Kaiser Family Foundation that summarizes the key pillars of SDOH. Assumption 1: Food deserts in and of themselves diminish peoples’ healthy nutrition lifestyles. Low-income households who are exposed to the same food-buying

 

Heart-Love – Omron’s Holy Grail of Blood Pressure Tracking on the Wrist

It’s February 1st, which marks the first of 28 days of American Heart  Month – a time to get real, embrace, learn about, and engage with heart health. Heart disease kills 610,000 people in the U.S. every year, equal to 1 in 4 deaths in America. It’s the leading cause of death for both men and women in the U.S. Knowing your blood pressure is an important step for managing the risks of heart disease. That hasn’t yet been available to those of us who quantify our steps, weight, sleep, food intake, and other health metrics. In 2017, Hugh Langley

 

What Healthcare Can Learn from A Pig and Piggy Bank via Santander Bank

When patients feel disrespected in a medical exam room, they will be less likely to follow instructions they receive from a doctor. Research from the Altarum Institute revealed this fundamental finding. The chart shows that feeling respected reduces  a patient’s diabetes medication adherence by a factor of nearly 2x, and is a risk factor for poorly managed diabetes. Furthermore, consumers who feel disrespected by providers are three times more likely to not believe doctors are accurate sources of information than consumers who do feel respected. And, patients with diabetes who do not feel respected are one-third more likely to have poorly

 

What A Duck Can Teach Us at CES 2018

We’re spending more time at CES 2018 calling out the societal and health impacts of technologies, especially for children and under-served people. How surprised and delighted I am to find a positive, enchanting impact at the convergence of kids and tech…from a duck. When I say “duck,” there are a few images that probably swim up in your mind’s eye: Donald, Daisy, Daffy, Howard, Darkwing, and the brand-famous Aflac Duck (who has his own Twitter handle @AflacDuck). It’s this last-named web-footed feathered friend who is a major star here at CES 2018 in the persona of My Special Aflac Duck.

 

Healthy Living in Digital Times at CES 2018

Connecting Life’s Dots, the organization Living in Digital Times partners with CES to deliver conference content during the show. At CES 2018, LIDT is connecting a lot of dots to help make health streamline into daily living. Robin Raskin, founder, kicked off LIDT’s press conference setting the context for how technology is changing lifestyles. Her Holy Grail is to help make tech fun for everybody, inclusive for everybody, and loved by everybody, she enthused. LIDT has been a presence at CES for many years, conceiving the contest the Last Gadget Standing, hosting  tech-fashion shows with robots, and supporting a young innovators

 

Smarter, Streamlined, Connected Consumers – The Promise of CES 2018

Journalists and industry analysts from around the globe have come to Las Vegas which, this week, is the mecca for new-new electronic things that companies think consumers will be keen to buy. On media day 1, I spoke with a colleague from the Netherlands who covers audio, a sector that’s certainly in disruption; an automotive analyst from India covering autonomous vehicles; and, a mobile tech guru based in Dubai, to identify just a few of my media friends who have gathered here to research and write on their respective beats. In these conversations, there are some common buzzwords floating around

 

Searching Las Vegas for Health at CES 2018

While a phrase containing the words “health” and “Las Vegas” may seem a dichotomy, there will be a lot of health-tangent goods and services I’ll be seeking next week at the annual CES. This year, health will be ubiquitous at this huge conference, whose three-letter acronym for “consumer electronics show” typically conjures up images of shiny new things in the guise of automobiles, video games, big TV screens, and drones. At CES 2018, health will go beyond wearable tech and the first phase of fitness that’s been growing at the meeting over the past five years since I began attending

 

The Cloud’s Growing Role in Consumer-Pharma Health Engagement

The pharmaceutical industry is facing a multitude of political, regulatory, and financial uncertainties in and beyond 2018. But there’s one thing I know for sure about pharma’s morphing business model: it’s that patients are playing a growing role in the industry’s future well-being. That is, if the industry can meet health consumers where they want to be met. Patients want more communication and support from pharma companies, a new study from Accenture found. In fact, over one-third of patients tell their health care providers about pharma patient-service programs: this chart from Accenture’s study illustrates the top seven ways providers hear

 

Will Getting Bigger Make Hospitals Get Better?

This month, two hospital mega-mergers were announced between Ascension and Providence, two of the nation’s largest hospital groups; and, between CHI and Dignity Health. In terms of size, the CHI and Dignity combination would create a larger company than McDonald’s or Macy’s in terms of projected $28 bn of revenue. (Use the chart of America’s top systems to do the math). For context, other hospital stories this week discuss in southern New Jersey. And this week, the New Jersey Hospital Association annual report called the hospital industry the “$23.4 billion economic bedrock” of the state. Add a third important item

 

CVS + Aetna: An Inflection Point for American Healthcare

The nation’s largest retail pharmacy chain signed a deal to combine with one of the top three health insurance companies. The deal is valued at $69 billion. I wrote about this inflection point for U.S. healthcare four weeks ago here in Health Populi. CVS is both the biggest pharmacy and pharmacy benefit manager in the U.S., as the first chart shows. In my previous post, I talked about the value of vertical integration bringing together the building blocks of retail pharmacy and pharmacist care, retail clinics, the PBM (Caremark), along with Aetna’s health plan member base and business. As Amazon and other

 

Consumers Seek Health Engagement Everywhere: the Case for Alcohol and Breweries

More consumers are seeking health-making opportunities everywhere, both within and outside of traditional healthcare touch-points. That includes peoples’ consumption of beer. We learned from the Edelman Health Engagement Barometer that consumers seek to engage for health beyond healthcare organizations – namely, hospitals, providers, over-the-counter medicines, pharma and insurance. What was perhaps the most surprising industry segment consumers called on for personal health engagement was brewing and alcohol. Fully 8 in 10 consumers expect brewing and spirits companies to engage in health. The bar chart shows this finding, arraying beer and liquor producers on par with retail and consumer technology, along

 

TIME Magazine’s Best Inventions – Health-y Things and Privacy Questions

Health permeates a plethora of TIME magazine’s 25 Best Inventions of 2017. From head to foot, health is the mother of invention, based on TIME’s curation of “the best” things launched to market in the past year. Starting with “the head,” the Oculus Go virtual reality (VR) headset from Facebook. While the first function with which VR is associated is fun and games, Dr. Brennan Spiegel at UCLA Geffen School of Medicine has been proving out VR‘s value in helping patients deal with pain and medical management. Keep your eye on his and others’ research into VR’s use in healthcare. The

 

Rx Delivery to the Patient’s Door: Home Is Where the Health/Care Is

Talk about the last mile in healthcare. CVS Pharmacy will deliver prescription drugs to patients’ homes, the company announced this week. “Same-day prescription delivery gives customers the easy option of having the pharmacy they trust deliver right to their front door at no cost,” Helen Foulkes, President of CVS Pharmacy, said in the press release. Rx home delivery may not be “the” last mile to conquer all healthcare access challenges, but it’s nonetheless a signal that healthcare industry suppliers are focusing on helping patients streamline their health-consumer lives. In this case, it’s also CVS morphing towards Amazon’s Prime delivery model. Amazon

 

Evidence is Growing for Using Digital Health Apps, Says IQVIA

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

 

Health Care Is 2.5 More Expensive Than Food for the Average U.S. Family

The math is straightforward. Assume “A” equals $59.039, the median household income in 2016. Assume “B” is $18,142, the mean employer-sponsored family insurance premium last year. B divided by A equals 30.7%, which is the percent of the average U.S. family’s income represented by the premium cost of health insurance. Compare that to what American households spent on food: just over $7,000, including groceries and eating out (which is garnering a larger share of U.S. eating opportunities, a topic for another post). Thus, health care represents, via the home’s health insurance premium, represents 2.5 times more than food for the

 

A Health Consumer Perspective on CVS+Aetna

  A response to Amazon’s potential moves in healthcare and pharmacy…strategic positioning for the post-Trump healthcare landscape…vertical integration to better manage healthcare utilization and costs…these, and other rationale have been offered by industry analysts and observers of the discussions between CVS and Aetna, for the former to acquire the latter. “A pharmacy chain buying a health insurance company?” many have asked me over the past few days. These inquiring minds include people who work both inside and outside of health/care. I ask back: in 2017 and in the future, “What is a pharmacy? What is a health plan?” See the

 

In the Post-Weinstein Era, How to Market Health to Women: Philips, Kalenji, and Libresse Getting It Right

“With Mad Men still in charge, ad campaigns miss the mark,” an editorial published this week in the Financial Times asserts. Leave it to a fiscally conservative British publication to be spot-on about a particularly, but not uniquely, American challenge, in this post-Weinstein (Miramax), -Price (Amazon), and today, -Halperin (MSNBC) moment of sexual harassment revelations. In health/care, women are key consumers, buyers and influencers, yet under-represented in the Mad Men demographic of senior advertising executives, as the data-driven FT essay points out. So it’s especially heartening to find this month a few examples of empowering, inspiring ad campaigns getting health/care marketing

 

Health (Healthcare, Not So Much) Abounds in Prophet’s Top 50 Brands

U.S. consumers’ most-valued brands include Apple, Google, Amazon, Netflix, Pinterest, Android, Spotify, PIXAR, Disney and Samsung, according to  the 2017 Brand Relevance Index from Prophet. The top 50 are shown in the first chart. On the second chart, I’ve circled in red the brands that have reach into healthcare, health, fitness, and wellness. Arguably, I could have circled every brand in the top 50 because in one way or another, depending on the individual, people find health “everywhere” that’s relevant to them based on their own definitions and value-systems. This is Prophet’s third year conducting this study, and I was

 

Four Things We Want in 2017: Financial Health, Relationships, Good Food, and Sleep

THINK: money and love. To find health, working-aged people seek financial stability and good relationships, according to the Consumer Health POV Report from Welltok, meQuilibrium, and Zipongo, featured in their webinar broadcast today. The online consumer survey was conducted among 2,000 full-time working U.S. adults in August 2017, segmented roughly into thirds by Boomers (37%), Gen Xers (32%), and Millennials (31%). Much lower down the priority list for healthy living are managing food, sleep, and stress based on the poll. Feeling stress is universal across most consumers in each of the three generational cohorts, especially related to work and finance.

 

Income Inequality For Older Americans Among Highest in the World – What This Means for Healthcare

Old-age inequality among current retirees in the U.S. is already greater than in ever OECD country except Chile and Mexico, revealed in Preventing Ageing Unequally from the OECD. Key findings from the report are that: Inequalities in education, health, employment and income start building up from early ages At all ages, people in bad health work less and earn less. Over a career, bad health reduces lifetime earnings of low-educated men by 33%, while the loss is only 17% for highly-educated men Gender inequality in old age, however, is likely to remain substantial: annual pension payments to the over-65s today are

 

What Health Plans Must Learn from Amazon

One in two U.S. consumers told Aflac that enrolling in health insurance should feel like an experience on Amazon. But health consumers still lack that high benchmark retail experience with health plans, based on new research published in HealthMine’s 2017 Health Intelligence Report focusing on communication and digital healthcare tools. “Most members believe health plan communications are impersonal and centered around bills rather than healthcare guidance,” HealthMine asserts in the introduction to the report. That’s about as un-Amazon as we can imagine.   Top findings from HealthMine’s research are that: 3 in 4 consumers don’t think their health insurance plan

 

Consumers Use Digital Health Tools But Still Struggle with Health Literacy

While more U.S. patients are use digital health tools and take on more clinical and financial decision making for their health care, people also have gaps in health engagement and health literacy. Three studies published in early October 2017 provide insights into the state of healthcare consumerism in America. The 2017 UnitedHealthcare Consumer Sentiment Survey found that a plurality of Americans (45%) turn first to primary care providers (doctors or nurses) as their source for the first source of information about specific health symptoms, conditions or diseases. 28% of people also use the internet or mobile health apps as their

 

The Rx is UX: A Prescription for EHRs and Patient Engagement

It’s National Health IT Week (#NHIT Week), and I’m revisiting research published earlier this year to connect the dots between EHR implementation (good news: it’s nearly universal in doctors’ offices and hospitals) and patients embracing their health information (not-so-much). What’s missing: UX design and respect for peoples’ life-flows.  Most physician practices and hospitals in the U.S. have installed electronic health records (EHRs). But in a classic Field of Dreams scenario, we have made patients’ medical records digital, but people aren’t asking for them or accessing them en masse. “How do we make it easier for patients to request and manage their

 

The Patient Is The Vector: Health 2.0 – Day 2 Learnings

  Question: “What is the opposite of ‘patient-centered care?'” asked a panelist on Day 1 of the 11th Annual Health 2.0 Conference. Answer: “‘Physician-centered care.'” Even physicians today see the merits of patient engagement, as this survey from New England Journal of Medicine found earlier this year. Since the launch of the first Health 2.0 Conference in 2007, the patient has played a growing role in session content and, increasingly, on the big stage and panel breakout sessions. A panel I attended on Day 2 convened five developers of patient engagement platforms and digital tools to help healthcare look and

 

Leveraging the Essential Data of Life: Health 2.0 – Day 1 Learnings

The future of effective and efficient healthcare will be underpinned by artful combinations of both digital technologies and “analog humans,” if the first day of the Health 2.0 Conference is a good predictor. Big thoughts about a decentralized future in healthcare kicked off Day 1 of the 11th annual Health 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara, CA. The co-founders of Health 2.0 (H20), Matthew Holt and Indu Subaiya, explained the five drivers of the tech-enabled health future. 1. The new interoperability, underpinned by FHIR standards and blockchain. “FHIR” stands for fast healthcare interoperability resources, which are informatics standards that enable data

 

To Meet Health Consumers’ Digital Demands, Think Netflix and Verizon

  Health consumers have become savvy about the role of technology in their healthcare, according to a survey from Ambra, a company that is in the health cloud business. The survey paints a picture of health consumers hungry for digital health connections. The most popular activities patients do online for health were: To research symptoms and treatments To renew and/or fill prescriptions To view lab reports To make appointments To pay medical bills To correspond with the nurse or doctor To view imaging reports To get virtual care, and, To participate in patient communities. To meet patients where they want

 

The Mainstreaming of Wellness

“Wellness is a way to cope with the demands and rigors of new modern lifestyles,” according to Ogilvy in their latest report, The Wellness Movement Pioneers: New Global Research Findings. The report makes the case that the mass public are project-managing life adopting mental health, nutrition, physical activity and sleep to boost personal wellness. There is a big business model underneath this, which has inspired Ogilvy to start up the company’s Health & Wellness Practice. Think of this report as the group’s own business case to address the $3.7 trillion global wellness economy, illustrated by the first image. The report

 

Envisioning Healthcare Innovation and Value with Microsoft

Fast Company’s October 2017 issue leads with a cover story featuring Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella, with the title, “Microsoft Rewrites the Code.” The issue of Fast.Co is devoted to the theme of innovation by design, and the 8-page story on the company emphasizes the themes of empathy and collaboration in re-imagining the organization. I lead with this because I’m now in Orlando preparing to participate in Microsoft’s annual meeting called Envision. This conference brings together the company’s clients from around the world, representing major industry segments. I’m grateful to be invited to participate in the first of six sessions devoted

 

Patients Are Looking to Finance Healthcare Over Time

Most U.S. patients want healthcare providers to offer cost information before a procedure, and whether doctors offer financial options to help them extend payments over time. This is an automotive or home appliance procedure we’re talking about. It’s healthcare services, and American patients are now the third largest payors to providers in the nation. Thus, the title of a new report summarizing a consumer survey from HealthFirst notes, “It’s Never Too Soon to Communicate Pricing and Payment Options. The study found that two-thirds of U.S. consumers would like healthcare providers to discuss financing options; however, only 18 percent of providers have

 

Healthcare Overtreatment in the U.S. – Risky and Costly

Overtreatment is a major contributor to waste and patient risk in America. Most U.S. physicians say it’s a common fact of life in American healthcare, gleaned through physician survey detailed in Overtreatment in the United States, published in PLOS One on September 6, 2017. The overwhelming majority (8 in 10 physicians) identified malpractice as the reason for overtreatment, followed by patient pressure/request (59%). Other reasons cited for overtreatment included: Difficulty accessing prior medical records Borderline indications Inadequate time to spend with patients, and Lack of adequate information or previous medical history. Overall, physicians judged 20% of healthcare to fall into

 

The Digital Gap in Health Consumer/Patient Experience

9 in 10 hospitals and health systems prioritize improving the consumer/patient experience, but only 30% of providers are building these capabilities. This consumer experience gap was found by Kaufman Hall in their survey research published in the report, 2017 State of Consumerism in Healthcare: Slow Progress in Fast Times. Digital health innovations will play big roles in supporting that consumer health experience for most health providers: 58% prioritize offering digital tool and information for consumer engagement, and 56% of providers look to develop a range of virtual/telehealth access points. But it appears that while healthcare providers’ spirits are willing, their flesh

 

Cost and Personalization Are Key For Health Consumers Who Shop for Health Plans

        Between 2012 and 2017, the number of US consumers who shopped online for health insurance grew by three times, from 14% to 42%, according to a survey from Connecture. Cost first, then “keeping my doctor,” are the two top considerations when shopping for health insurance. 71% of consumers would consider switching their doctor(s) to save on plan costs. Beyond clinician cost, health plans shoppers are also concerned with prescription drug costs in supporting their decisions. 80% of consumers would be willing to talk with their doctors about prescription drug alternatives, looking for a balance between convenience

 

Price-Shopping for Healthcare Still A Heavy Lift for Consumers

Most U.S. consumers support the idea of price-shopping for healthcare, but don’t practice it. While patients “should” shop for health care and perceive differences in costs across providers, few seek information about their personal out-of-pocket costs before getting treatment. Few Americans shop around for health care, even when insured under a high-deductible health plan, conclude Ateev Mehrotra and colleagues in their research paper, Americans Support Price Shopping For Health Care, But Few Actually Seek Out Price Information. The article is published in Health Affairs‘ August 2017 issue. The bar chart shows some of the survey results, with the top-line finding

 

Learning From Adam Niskar – Living Beyond The Wheelchair

After diving into Walnut Lake in suburban Detroit, Adam Niskar sustained a spinal injury that would paralyze much of his body for the rest of his life. The trauma didn’t paralyze his life and living, though. But today, my family will celebrate that life at Adam’s memorial service. Adam was my cousin. He was one of the best-loved people on the planet, and that was part of a therapeutic recipe that sustained him from the traumatic accident in 1999 until Monday, July 31st, 2017, when Adam passed away from complications due to an infection that, this time around, his body

 

Health Equity Lessons from July 23, 1967, Detroit

On July 23, 1967, I was a little girl wearing a pretty dress, attending my cousin’s wedding at a swanky hotel in mid-town Detroit. Driving home with my parents and sisters after the wedding, the radio news channel warned us of the blazing fires that were burning in a part of the city not far from where we were on a highway leading out to the suburbs. Fifty years and five days later, I am addressing the subject of health equity at a speech over breakfast at the American Hospital Association 25th Annual Health Leadership Summit today. In my talk,

 

The Art of Emojis in Constipation-Conversation

“Constipation is hard. Talking about it is even harder,” reads a card I received from the senior director of marketing at Synergy Pharmaceuticals. Emojis-meet-direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical promotion in a new campaign from the drug company, which is embarking on a disease education campaign to bring greater awareness to the condition of chronic idiopathic constipation (CIC). This condition impacts 14% of the global population. The messengers for this effort are a cast of emojis who populate a continuum from constipation-to-diarrhea and every poop step in-between. Meet The Poop Troop: Stressed-Out Stooly Clogged Chris Left-Out Lumpy Plugged-Up Paulie Miss La Poop Mr. Smooth Sausage Sally

 

Patients Switch Doctors Based on Service, Not Just Care or Costs – Think “Text”

There’s more evidence of shopping behavior among patients: there’s new data showing that patients-as-consumers switch healthcare providers not due to quality of care or costs, but because of lack of service. I discovered one key verb and feature patient-consumers expect from doctors: it’s the ability to text, for appointment reminders, alerts, treatments, and communicating with the practice. SolutionReach, in the business of patient engagement, conducted a survey among 500 consumers asking about primary care providers, communication experience and satisfaction levels. The company presented the research results in a webinar on 29 June 2017. The research was also written up in

 

Consumer Experience Is An Integral Part of the Healthcare Experience

Patient satisfaction should be baked into healthcare provider service goals, according to Prioritizing the Patient Experience from West Corporation, the communications company. West is in the business of improving communications systems, and has a vested interest in expanding comms in health. This research polled patients and providers to assess how each healthcare stakeholder perceives various patient satisfaction issues, which when done well are grounded in sound communications strategy and technologies. Patient satisfaction is directly linked to the bottom lines of healthcare organizations, West contends, due to two key drivers: Evolving payment models are increasingly tying patient satisfaction to reimbursements; and,

 

Helping People On A Path to Better Health with CVS @Retail

“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,

 

Healthcare Cost Concerns Trump All Others Across the Generations

Patients, evolving into health consumers, seek a better healthcare experience. While most people are pretty satisfied with their medical care, cost and confusion reign. This is the topline finding of a study from Oliver Wyman appropriately titled, Complexity and Opportunity, a survey of U.S. health consumers’ worries and wants. Oliver Wyman collaborated on the research with the FORTUNE Knowledge Group. Consumers’ biggest healthcare concerns deal with costs: rising insurance premiums; greater out-of-pocket costs for care not covered by insurance; and, the growing costs of prescription drugs together rank as the top 3 healthcare concerns in this study. After costs, consumers cite government

 

U.S. Consumers Expect, But Don’t See, Innovation From the Health & Wellness Industry

U.S. consumers consider Consumer Electronics to be the most innovative industry they know. But people believe that Health & Wellness should be the most innovative sector in the economy. Welcome to the 2017 Klick Health Consumer Survey, which focuses on health innovation in the context of peoples’ hopes for technology to improve health and healthcare. 1 in 2 people say that technology has had a positive impact on their health and wellness, skewing slightly more toward younger people (although 45% of people 55 years of age and older agree that tech positively contributes to health. 41% of consumers say they’ve

 

From Hospitality to Health-pitality to Sportspitality

“Stay well, even on the road,” welcomes the chain of EVEN Hotels. That message from a hospitality company is part of the growth of the retail health landscape, driven by consumers’ desire to live well and make healthy decisions every day – even during business trips. The message is that, “Wellness is more than a word. It’s your way of life. But when it’s time to travel, it all falls apart,” Who among us road warriors for work doesn’t get that message? This is a real trend that engaged health consumers have begun to demand. A friend of mine traveled this week

 

Amazon’s Health Care Building Blocks

In the past few weeks, two announcements from Amazon point to a strategy, whether intended or my dot-connecting, that the ecommerce leader has the health of its customers in its sights. In late May, CNBC first published the news that Amazon was seeking out a candidate to be a general manager for a pharmacy business. Here’s the video telling the story. Getting into the retail pharmacy channel is in itself a huge message to this health industry segment, which is very competitive between chain pharmacies (led by CVS, Walgreens, and Rite-Aid), grocery pharmacies (the largest of which are Kroger and

 

A New Health Risk: Hacked Personal Medical Devices

We have entered an era of insecurity in healthcare in America. While major attention is being paid to healthcare insurance and service insecurity, food insecurity and financial insecurity, there’s another one to add to this list: medical device security. As more medical devices have moved into the digital internet-connected mode, the risk for malware, ransomware, and overall hack-ability grows. This increasing and challenging risk is covered in the report, Medical Device Security: An Industry Under Attack and Unprepared to Defend from Ponemon Institute. Ponemon Institute has been tracking information security across industries, including healthcare, for several years. In this survey, sponsored

 

The Consumer Trust Deficit In Health Engagement

While trust in major institutions is eroding the world over, peoples’ trust in healthcare is on the rise, according to the 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer. Still, compared to other industry sectors, healthcare is still barely positive — and just one spot ahead of financial services. When it comes to trust, “the healthcare industry is making slow but steady progress,” notes Kym White who leads Edelman’s healthcare practices. Consumers’ trust in the five healthcare segments of pharmaceutical/drug companies, consumer health/over the counter, biotech/life sciences, insurance and hospitals/clinics is improving over 2016. In the U.S., for pharma and biotech, trust is reversing a

 

Healthcare Costs for a Family of Four Will Reach $27,000 in 2017

If you had $27,000 in your wallet, would you spend it on a 2017 Kia Optima sedan, 28 shares of Amazon stock, or healthcare? $26,944 is this year’s estimate of what healthcare will cost a family of four in the U.S., based on the 2017 Milliman Medical Index (MMI). This is based on the projected total costs of healthcare for a family covered by an employer-sponsored PPO plan. Milliman, the actuarial consulting firm, has conducted the MMI going back to 2001. I’ve watched the rise and rise of this index for years, explained annually in the Health Populi blog since its inception

 

Home Is the New and Future Medical Home for Dialysis

The economics of kidney disease in America is a hefty burden: about 26 million people in the U.S. have some aspect of chronic kidney disease and are at-risk of kidney failure. The number of people diagnosed with kidney disease doubled during each of the last two decades, according to the American Society of Nephrology. The annual cost of treating end-stage renal disease (ESRD) is over $32 billion, consuming 28% of Medicare expenditures…and increasing. Now consider the personal costs of dialysis in America: about $500 for a single hemodialysis treatment in a center, roughly $72,000 a year for one patient. There

 

The Pharmacy as Herbalist – An Italian Prescription

CNN called it, “the ancient perfume store you never heard of,” but the Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella had its literal roots in medicinal herbs. With scents wafting onto a 13th century Florence piazza, the Farmacia now operates as a pharmacy storefront for homeopathic and herbal supplements, along with perfumes and home scents. A visit to the pharmacy today is a journey into medicinal time-travel, back to the year 1221. I spent time in the pharmacy today to learn about the literal roots of the shop in medicinal herbs cultivated in a monastery garden and reformulated by monks into

 

Valuing Children = Valuing Health: Learning From Florence, Italy

This week I celebrate two spring holy holidays in one city that embraces spirituality, civility, and culture: Florence, Italy. Today, I had the special opportunity to tour Ospedale degli Innocenti: the Hospital of the Innocents. The hospital is now an institute for studying the culture and economics of children, and a museum telling a unique story of Florentine babies born in the early 15th century, spanning our contemporary era. The founding and root history of this beautiful place has lessons to teach us even today. It is key to realize, first, that Florentine humanism exalted the ideal virtues of the

 

Finding Health in Consumer Goods

People want to live healthier lives, and consumer good companies are responding to these demands to keep and gain market share and profit margins. Consumer product firms reformulated over 180,000 consumer products in 2016 for in response to consumers’ health and wellness wishes, based on data collected by Deloitte for The Consumer Goods Forum project (CGF) and published in The CGF Health & Wellness Progress Report. The CGF is an industry network of some 400 consumer goods, retail, and service companies supporting the global adoption of standards and practices. This Report focused on the CGF members’ progress toward health and wellness

 

Health Insurance Plans Rank Lowest In Consumer Experience

Consumers love their supermarkets, fast food shops, retailers, delivery services, and banks. These industries rank highest in the 2017 Temkin Experience Ratings, my go-to source for understanding consumer service Nirvana. Health insurance companies and internet service providers (ISPs) are at the bottom of the Temkin Ratings, as shown in the first chart. Note that health plans range from a score approaching 70 to under 50, illustrating the very wide range of consumer experience from okay-to-good, too very poor. The top-ranked health plan was Kaiser Permanente, with a rating of 67%; Health Net was ranked the worst of the health plans

 

A New Risk Factor For Mental Health: Climate Change

We make our health across many dimensions: via nutrition, safe physical/built environments, financial wellness, education, and the environment among them. In this last category, the environment, new research finds that climate change has a significant impact on health. The report, Mental Health and Our Changing Climate: Impacts, Implications, and Guidance, was sponsored by the American Psychological Association in conjunction with Climate for Health and ecoAmerica. “Climate change-induced severe weather and other natural disasters have the most immediate effects on mental health in the form of the trauma and shock due to personal injuries, loss of a loved one, damage to

 

The Fall of the TrumpCare is Retail Health’s Gain in 2017

The non-vote for and withdrawal of The American Health Care Act on March 24, 2017, was a win for the retail health market, at least in the short-run. Before the vote, there had been some pronouncements that the passage of the AHCA would have been a boon to retail health. Here’s one story stating that, “A boom in medical tourism to Mexico predicted if Obamacare ends.” Another article asserts, “Why the American Health Care Act Works for Retailers,” a public policy statement from the National Retail Federation (NRF). But NRF, please don’t fret. Retail health is consumer-driven and will persist beyond the

 

Most Medicare Patients Haven’t Accessed Their EHR Information (Yet)

The HITECH Act, part of the Stimulus Bill (officially, the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, ARRA) invested $35 billion of U.S. taxpayer funds to incentivize health care providers (doctors and hospitals) to acquire and use electronic health record systems (EHRs). Most providers have taken advantage of these financial incentives, so that EHRs are now part of mainstream medical practice and workflow among providers. For patients, and particularly those enrolled in the government programs of Medicare and Medicaid, personal access to their personal data in EHRs has been largely elusive. While nearly 9 in 10 doctors and hospitals have offered these

 

Patients Grow Comfortable With Digital Health Tools, CDW Finds

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

 

What’s the Future Of Fit? Join adidas At #SXSW17

The truest form of health reform and consumer-directed health care isn’t in a high-deductible health plan or a health savings account, and it doesn’t come out of Washington DC or your employer’s health benefits office. It comes from you in the form of self-care and DIY healthcare. In this case, think “inspired by sport, powered by you.” I’ll be participating on a panel at this weekend’s South-by-Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, along with three wellness innovators: Nick Buettner of the Blue Zones project, Mary Liz McCurdy of Google, and John Wilbanks from Sage Bionetworks. Together, our quartet will brainstorm the

 

Your Zip Code Is Your Wellness Address

Geography is destiny, Napoleon is thought to have first said. More recently, the brilliant physician Dr. Abraham Verghese has spoken about “geography as destiny” in his speeches, such as “Two Souls Intertwined,” The Tanner Lecture he delivered at the University of Utah in 2012. Geography is destiny for all of us when it comes to our health and well-being, once again proven by Gallup-Healthways in The State of American Well-Being 2016 Community Well-Being Rankings. The darkest blue circles in the U.S. map indicate the metro areas in the highest-quintile of well-being. The index of well-being is based on five metrics, of consumer self-ranking

 

Images of Health, Vitality and Life at #HIMSS17

The plane has left the Orlando airport, and I’m looking back at the past week at the 2017 annual meeting of HIMSS, the annual health IT conference that has been my pleasure and (foot) pain to attend for the past two+ decades (for real). Walking the exhibition floor, I encountered some new flavors of imaging that went way beyond bits and bytes, data and technology. These images spoke to me of health, vitality, and life. I’m sharing them with you here, with no intention of selling you company products or services but simply sharing some images that speak to these

 

How Amazon Has Primed Healthcare Consumers – My Update with Frances Dare, Accenture

“I want what I want, when and how I want it.” If you think that sounds like a spoiled child, that’s not who I’m quoting. It’s you, if you are a mainstream consumer in the U.S., increasingly getting “primed” by Amazon which is setting a new bar for retail experience in terms of immediacy, customer service, and breadth of offerings. I talked about this phenomenon in my Health Populi post, How Amazon Has Primed Healthcare Consumers. The blog discussed my take on Accenture’s latest study into healthcare consumers based on the report’s press release. I appreciated the opportunity to sit

 

Healthcare and the Autonomous Car: Setting the Stage for HIMSS17

The autonomous car is a metaphor for healthcare: that’s how my first interview kicking off the  HIMSS marathon began. The annual 2017 HIMSS conference isn’t your father’s or mother’s HIMSS of ten years ago, or even the HIMSS of 2010 — the year that financial incentives for EHR adoption began to stream from the HITECH Act of 2009, motivating thousands of healthcare providers to acquire and meaningfully use digital health records systems. Then, the HIMSS conference floor was abuzz with EHR frenzy. This week, over 43,000 people working at the intersection of healthcare and technology have converged in Orlando, Florida, for

 

How Amazon Has Primed Healthcare Consumers

We are all Amazon Prime primed as consumers now. So it should not surprise healthcare providers, plans and suppliers that consumers expect just-in-time convenience for their healthcare, Accenture has found. Mind the gap: 8 in 10 U.S. patients would welcome some aspect of virtual healthcare, but only 1 in 5 providers is meeting that need. The consumer demand for virtual care is palpable for: Tracking biometrics, among 77% of consumers (say, for measuring blood pressure or blood glucose for people managing diabetes) Following up appointments, for 76% of people after seeing a doctor or being discharged from hospital Receiving reminders

 

My $100 Flu Shot: How Much Paper Waste Costs U.S. Healthcare

An abbreviated version of this post appeared in the Huffington Post on 9 February 2017. This version includes the Health Populi Hot Points after the original essay, discussing the consumer’s context of retail experience in healthcare and implications for the industry under Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price — a proponent of consumer-directed healthcare and, especially, health savings accounts. We’ll be brainstorming the implications of the 2016 CAQH Index during a Tweetchat on Thursday, February 16, at 2 pm ET, using the hashtag #CAQHchat. America ranks dead-last in healthcare efficiency compared with our peer countries, the Commonwealth Fund

 

Patients Anxiously Prep to Be Healthcare Consumers, Alegeus Finds

Healthcare consumers are in a “state of denial,” according to research conducted for Alegeus, the consumer health benefits company. Overall, 3 in 4 consumers feel fear when it comes to their healthcare finances: most people worry about being hit with unexpected healthcare costs they can’t afford, and nearly half fear they won’t be able to afford their family’s healthcare needs. The wordle illustrates consumers’ mixed feelings about healthcare: while people feel frustrated, overwhelmed, powerless, confused and skeptical about healthcare in America, there are some emerging adjectives hinting at growing consumer health muscle-building: optimistic, hopeful, supported, engaged, accountable. Still, denial and

 

Doctors See Benefits in Patient Engagement Via Health IT

A special report on patient engagement and digital technology was published this month in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). Based on a survey of doctors and healthcare executives, the research found that clinicians and managers welcome the opportunity to use digital tech — when it makes financial sense. That conclusion inspired the title of the article, Patient Engagement Survey: Technology Tools Gain Support – But Cost Is a Hurdle. NEJM polled 595 members of the NEJM Catalyst Insights Council, which included healthcare executives and clinicians who deliver healthcare. Here is NEJM’s scenario on patient-engaging health IT, a Holy Grail of sorts:

 

The Health Disparity of Information Access

Among many health disparities which mar healthcare quality in the United States, there’s another one to add to the list: health and healthcare information access. Access to health care is underpinned in large part on a health consumer’s access to information about available health care services, their location, price, and if the patient is very fortunate to glean, quality. As people take on more responsibility for managing their health care utilization and financing in America, their access to information that is easy-to-find, clear, comprehensive and current is critical to personal and public health outcomes. But consumers are dissatisfied with the

 

Replacing Opioids with Digital Tech for Pain at CES 2017

Pain management is a growing story at CES 2017. I covered the topic of Sleep and Pain at CES one year ago in the Huffington Post, and this year, the category has grown in both number of innovations and mode of pain management. At CES 2017, there were exhibitors of FDA-approved devices, sleep-and-pain focused tech, wristbands for relaxation and nausea-management, and a $5,999 device for calming meditation that’s being used in addiction programs. What’s driving growth and acceptance of this health tech segment is the opioid crisis which has become a public health epidemic across the U.S. The maps with increasing orange

 

Your Car as Mobile Health Platform, at CES 2017

Mobile health (mHealth) has been long defined as care (broadly defined) delivered via mobile communications platforms, such as smartphones, text phones, and tablets. This week at CES, the automobile joins these consumer technologies based on the concepts and demos presented by several auto manufacturers at #CES2017 in Las Vegas. The most far-reaching mobile health scenario was developed by Hyundai, unveiled as the Health + Mobility Cockpit. The innovation was featured in the Las Vegas Convention Center in an immersive virtual reality room. The concept car is embedded with sensors, which are designed to read the driver’s levels of stress, alertness

 

Looking Beyond Tech for Health at CES 2017 – the Social Determinants

I’m at CES 2017 in Las Vegas all this week looking for signs of health in new technology announcements. While it’s no surprise there are hundreds of new and new-and-improved digital health innovations on the exhibition floor, you can look beyond those aisles to other companies who are new entrants in health. Arguably, these companies can bolster peoples’ health at least as much as activity tracking and calorie counting. Here are five examples I wrote about in my Huffington Post column yesterday, The Social Determinants of Health Live At CES 2017: Safety – Liberty Mutual Nutrition – Terraillon Healthy Sex

 

Consumers Taking Healthcare Into Own Hands at CES 2017

Consumer electronics (CE) aren’t just big screen TVs, sexy cars, and videogames anymore. Among the fastest-growing segments in CE is digital health, and health-tech will be prominently featured at the 2017 CES in Las Vegas hours after the champagne corks have popped at the start of the new year. On the second day of 2017, I’ll be flying to Las Vegas for several days of consumer technology immersion, learning about connected and smart homes and cars, and shiny new things all devoted to personal health. Welcome to my all-health lens on CES 2017, once referred to as the Consumer Electronics

 

Consumers Want a Retail Experience in Healthcare

Why can’t the healthcare consumer experience be as easy as online banking? asks Tom Skelton, the CEO of Surescripts. That’s the expectation of most U.S. healthcare consumers, based on Surescripts latest survey results, summarized in the 2016 Connected Care and the Patient Experience report. The key findings are that U.S. consumers, Want their medical information delivered electronically, easily accessible and shareable; Are dissatisfied with the time and effort they spend on dealing with their medical information and waiting times in health care offices, both doctors and pharmacies; and, Prefer and expect innovative ways to get care and prescriptions. People are getting

 

Health Is Personal at the Connected Health Summit

“Because health is personal” is the tagline at the 2016 Connected Health Conference being held at the Gaylord Resort in National Harbor in metro Washington, DC. “Personal,” “Connected,” and “Health” are the three words that comprise the adjectives in the Personal Connected Health Alliance, the host of this conference. PCHA was formed through the merger of HIMSS, the health IT association, and Continua, the organization advocating for health technology “interoperability” — the ability for digital and communications technologies to communicate with each other, to remove friction from health data exchange. This week, PCHA announced that it will bring the Wireless-Life Sciences Alliance into

 

The Digital Health Gap For High-Cost, High-Need Patients

Several market forces are converging that boost patients’ ability to engage in their health and self-care, including peoples’ growing adoption of smartphones, demand for self-service and DIY lifestyles, and Americans’ growing responsibility as health consumers. Health consumers are using a growing array of self-health tools, enabled through digital technologies. However, these tools aren’t yet engaging some of the very people who need them the most: high-need, high-cost patients. Research into this situation is discussed in the December 2016 Health Affairs article, Many Mobile Heaath Apps Target High-Need, High-Cost Populations, But Gaps Remain, published in the December 2016 issue of Health Affairs. For

 

The Patient Is The Best Sensor – Consumers At the Center of Health

“The patient is the best sensor,” asserted Jamie Heywood, founder of Patients Like Me, during the perennial meeting sponsored by PwC, the 180° Health Forum. This event featured several panels of PwC’s curated group of so-called “provocateurs” in healthcare, and I was grateful to be one of nine selected for the event. Heywood joined Dr. Leanna Wen, Baltimore City Health Commissioner, and me in a panel called, “Strange Bedfellows or Soul Mates? The New Dating Game in Health.” The theme of our collective brainstorm was how collaborations across the ecosystem could help make health and healthcare better. The drawing is

 

The Growth of Digital Health @Retail

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

 

Digital Health Continues to Grow at CES 2017

I attended CES Unveiled in New York this week, which is a preview of what will be featured at the CES in Las Vegas in January 2017. CES, previously known as the Consumer Electronics Show, is celebrating a 50 year anniversary, having been born in Manhattan in 1967 when transistor radios, stereos, and black-and-white TVs were all the rage. Today, CES is the world’s largest innovation event, and the longest-lived. 10 of the original 1967 exhibitors still show at CES, including 3M, Philips, Sharp, SONY, Toshiba, and Westinghouse, among others. Meet George Jetson, who might have been an attendee at

 

Evidence That Mainstream Consumers Growing Digital Health Muscles

About 1 in 2 patients in the US are accessing their electronic health records in early 2016, according to Accenture’s 2016 Consumer Survey on Patient Engagement, Patients Want a Heavy Dose of Digital. This post is based on a presentation I attended by Accenture’s Dr. Kipp Webb yesterday. Accenture conducted survey research with consumers in seven countries for this study. The data and insights shared in this post are based only on the survey results from 2,225 US patients. The proportion of US health consumers accessing their health records grew from 27% in 2014 to 45% in 2016 — an increase of

 

Hospitals Need to Cross the Health Consumer Chasm

Most U.S. hospitals have not put consumerism into action, a new report from KaufmanHall and Caden’s Consulting asserts from the second paragraph. Patient experience is the highest priority, but has the biggest capability gap for hospitals, the report calls out. KaufmanHall surveyed 1,000 hospital and health system executives in 100 organizations to gauge their perspectives on health consumers and the hospital’s business. KaufmanHall points out several barriers for hospitals working to be consumer-centered: Internal/institutional resistance to change Lack of urgency Competing priorities Skepticism Lack of clarity (vis-a-vis strategic plan) Lack of data and analytics. The key areas identified for consumer centricity

 

Consumers Feel More Respect from Personal Care and Grocery Brands Than Pharma or Insurance

People feel like get-no-respect Rodney Dangerfield when they deal with health insurance, government agencies, or pharma companies. Consumers feel much more love from personal care and beauty companies, grocery and fitness, according to a brand equity study by a team from C Space, published in Harvard Businss Review. As consumer-directed health care (high deductibles, first-dollar payments out-of-pocket) continues to grow, bridging consumer trust and values will be a critical factor for building consumer market share in the expanding retail health landscape. Nine of the top 10 companies C Space identified with the greatest “customer quotient” are adjacent in some way to health:

 

The Mobile Health App Glut

Supply of mobile health apps greatly exceeds the demand for them, based on research2guidance’s report on the mHealth App Developer Economics 2016, analyzing the status and trends of the mobile health apps market. This is research2guidance’s sixth annual study on the topic. The line chart illustrates the hockey stick growth rate of the number of mHealth apps in app stores in blue, reaching some 259,000 apps available in major app stores in 2016. The declining red line shows the growth rate of the demand for apps, falling to 7% in 2016 after growing 35% in 2015. It’s not a money-making enterprise