A blog covering the health/care ecosystem and people.

Patients “yearn” for personalized services and relationships in health care — optimistic that technology can help deliver on that hope — we learn in Healthcare’s Future: Balancing Progress and Perception, a health consumer survey report from Lavidge. Lavidge, a communications/PR/marketing consultancy, polled U.S. patients’ attitudes about health care and technology in June 2024, publishing the report earlier this month.                   Start with over-arching finding that, “Three out of four patients believe the U.S. healthcare system is broken and there is a strong sense of distrust,” Lavidge asserts right at the top of

Only 2 in 5 people in the U.S. strongly trust science concerning food, nutrition, or diet, we learn from the 2024 IFIC Spotlight Survey: Americans’ Trust in Food & Nutrition Science, published in October.             IFIC is the International Food Information Council, a non-profit organization with a mission of communicating science-based information about food safety, nutrition, and sustainable food systems. IFIC surveyed 1,000 U.S. adults online in July to gauge consumers’ views on food and science.             The most-trusted sources of food information are the scientists involved in researching nutrition,

“Voter registration in hospitals is the new frontier in health care.” That’s the headline in a WBUR story last week detailing the efforts of health care professionals in “amplifying” their patients’ voices inside and outside of the hospital walls by advocating for their health citizenship — through voter registration and public health policy advocacy.                  I’m a long-time evangelist for health citizenship and the role that a person’s engagement in the civic commons plays in one’s own health, the health of their communities and of the nation as a whole. I’m not alone

Health care access is a challenge in rural and urban areas, cities and suburbs, and across more demographic groups than you might realize, as we see wait times grow for appointments, primary care shortages, and delays in screening plaguing health systems around the world. In the Future Health Index 2024, Philips’ latest annual report presents a profile of the state of health care focused on how to provide better care for more people.             For the report, Philips surveyed a total of 2,800 healthcare leaders consisting of 200 respondents in 14 countries: Australia, Brazil, China,

“Clinical transformation with AI is easier without patients.” When Dr. Grace Cordovano heard this statement on a panel of physicians convening to share perspectives on the future of AI in health care held in early March 2024, the board-certified patient advocate felt, in her words, “insulted on behalf of the patient communities I know that are working tirelessly to advance AI that works for them.” “The healthcare ecosystem and policy landscape must formally recognize patients as end-users and co-creators of AI,” Cordovano wrote to me in an e-mail exchange. “Patients, their care partners, caregivers, and advocates are already utilizing AI

It is about time that a healthcare journal features examples of patient-leaders who have pioneered activism, innovation, and The first exemplar in this vein is Casey Quinlan, whom we lost all-too-soon earlier this year on 24th August. A team of her appreciative colleagues and friends wrote up the first in a new series called “Extraordinary Lives” published in the Journal of Participatory Medicine (JPM) titled “An Extraordinary Voice Expressed Through Humor: A Tribute to Casey Quinlan.” I played a minor role in getting this essay to the finish line, and am grateful to have had the opportunity to do so

Barbie is having a moment, marketers agree. This weekend, many of us will buy movie tickets (yes, to see “real” movies in “real” brick-and-mortar cinemas) to see both the new film Oppenheimer along with the Barbie movie.           So many movie-goers will be making it a double-feature experience that started as a meme, the portmanteau “Barbenheimer,” to mark the cultural-phenomenon moment. And the marketing frenzy accompanying the release of Greta Gerwig’s film has been an astonishing plethora of collaborations with consumer-goods companies and retailers. To join the pink-inspired fray, I’m featuring Barbie’s health care lives in

Not all “retail health” sites are created equal, U.S. consumers seem to be saying in a new study from Wolters Kluwer Health, the company’s second Pharmacy Next: Consumer Care and Cost Trends survey. Specifically, consumers have begun to differentiate between health care delivered at a retail pharmacy versus care offered at a retail store — such as Target or Walmart (both named as sites that offer “health clinics in department stores” in the study press release). While 58% of Americans were likely to visit a local pharmacy as a “first step” when faced with a non-emergency medical situation and 79%

In the organization’s annual study into physicians’ wellbeing, Medscape has diagnosed worsening burnout and depression among America’s doctors.               Over one-half of U.S. physicians say they are burned out or depressed, the chart from the U.S. Physician Burnout & Depression Report for 2023 calls out. “I cry but not one cares,” is one of the represented color comments provided by one of the physicians included in the survey of 9,175 physicians polled online between June and October 2022. The study covered 29 specialties, finding most burned out physicians worked in emergency medicine (65% saying

Doctors in the U.S. believe that the medical mis-information problem is worsening, learned in survey research from Merck Manuals. Doctors and patients, both, have roles to play in addressing medical misinformation online.                   Less than half of consumers, 44%, said that that there is more medical mis-information online than previously. That’s less than half of the percentage of doctors saying so — 98%, virtually all U.S. physicians, citing the problem. There were several disconnects noted in the Merck Manuals study showing starkly different perceptions of health information online between doctors and patients:

The cost of health insurance for a worker who buys into a health plan at work in 2022 reached $22,463 for their family. The average monthly mortgage payment was $1,759 in mid-2022.               “When housing and health both rank as basic needs in Maslow’s hierarchy, what’s a health system to do?” I ask in an essay published today on Crossover Health’s website titled Value-Based Care: Driving a Social Contract of Trust and Health. The answer: embrace value-based care. Warren Buffett wrote Berkshire Hathaway shareholders in 2008, asserting that, “Price is what you pay. Value

Most doctors see the advantages of digital health tools like telehealth, consumers’ access to their health information, and point-of-care workflow solutions, the American Medical Association found in a survey of 1300 physicians, published in September 2022.             The AMA first conducted research with physicians and their views on digital health in July 2016. This year’s study was designed to compare current clinicians’ perspectives with those garnered in the 2016 and 2019 studies. There is a clear and positive shift of doctors’ adoption of and appreciation for digital tools, with “growth in enthusiasm” concentrated in tele-visits, the

Doctors heads and hearts are jammed with concerns beyond curing patients’ medical conditions: U.S. physicians are worried about big social issues, according to a Medscape survey report, Physicians’ Views on Today’s Divisive Social Issues 2022.               Topping physicians’ list of their top-five most important social issues, far above all others ranked healthcare access. Underneath that top-line statistic, it’s important to note that: 52% of doctors are “very concerned” about healthcare access, 28% are “concerned,” and 13% are “somewhat concerned.” Medscape underscores that in 2020, 31 million U.S. residents had no health insurance coverage, and

Four in five U.S. physicians were using telehealth to care for patients at the end of 2021.             Among those doctors who were not providing telehealth by late 2021, just over one half never did so during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the 2021 Telehealth Survey Report from the AMA. This report provides insightful  context for the upcoming annual ATA Conference for 2022, being held in-person in Boston kicking off May 1st. The meeting will be a strategically important, as the title of the conference asks: “What Now? Creating An Opportunity in a Time of

If you made your living in commercial real estate — and especially, working with hospitals’ and health systems’ office space — would the concept of telehealth be freaking you out right now? If you heed the words of JLL’s 2022 Patient Consumer Survey, you’d chill (at least a bit). The tagline on this paper is, “Convenience and choice drive patient decisions as new digital options take hold.” I was particularly keen to dig into this study based on its sponsoring organization: JLL is a real estate services company serving over a dozen vertical markets — including health care, life sciences,

While nurses were in short supply before 2020, the coronavirus pandemic and stress on front-line health care workers exacerbated the shortage of nursing staff globally. This urgent call-to-action became the rallying cry and objective for this weekend’s #NurseHack4Health, “The Front Line Is Shrinking,” with the goal of building a sustainable workforce of the future. I’m grateful to the nurse leadership teams at Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, and Sonsiel for inviting me to participate in another round of the #NurseHack4Health hackathon pitches over the past weekend. This year inspired nearly 800 registrants from at least 48 countries to convene via Microsoft

“Racial and ethnic inequities in the US health care system have been unremitting since the beginning of the country. In the 19th and 20th centuries, segregated black hospitals were emblematic of separate but unequal health care,” begins the editorial introducing an entire issue of JAMA dedicated to racial and ethnic disparities and inequities in medicine and health care, published August 17, 2021. This is not your typical edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The coronavirus pandemic has changed so many aspects of American health care for so many people, including doctors. Since the second quarter of 2020,

There is one health care public policy issue that unites U.S. voters across political party: that is the consumer-facing costs of prescription drugs. With the price of medicines in politicians’ and health citizens’ cross-hairs, the pharmaceutical and biotech industries have responded in many ways to the Rx pricing critiques from consumers (via, for example, Consumer Reports/Consumers Union and AARP), hospitals (through the American Hospital Association), and insurance companies (from AHIP, America’s Health Insurance Plans). The latest poll from the University of Chicago/Harris Public Policy and the Associate Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research quantifies the issue cross-party, finding that 74%

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

Wherever you live in the world touched by the coronavirus pandemic, you felt (and were) stress-tested. Both you were, and your home was as well. In this year’s 2021 annual report by Deloitte into Connectivity & Mobile Trends, their report details How the pandemic has stress-tested the crowded digital home. This analysis was done, as it is every year, by the Deloitte Center for Technology, Media & Telecommunications. Deloitte’s Center commissioned an online survey among 2,009 U.S. consumers to gauge five generations of peoples’ perspectives on connected life in the context of COVID. The report covers the various life-flows of

In the COVID-19 pandemic, health care spending in the U.S. increased by a relatively low 6.0% in 2020. This year, medical cost trend will rise by 7.0%, expected to decline a bit in 2022 according to the annual study from PwC Health Research Institute, Medical Cost Trend: Behind the Numbers 2022. What’s “behind these numbers” are factors that will increase medical spending (the “inflators” in PwC speak) and the “deflators” that lower costs. Looking around the future corner, the inflators are expected to be: A COVID-19 “hangover,” leading to increased health care services utilization Preparations for the next pandemic, and

The emergence of the COVID-19 vaccine “infodemic” has slowed the ability for nations around the world to emerge out of the public health crisis. Growing cynicism among some health citizens facing the politicization of public health tactics like vaccines and facial masks is what we’re talking about. At the root is peoples’ lack of trust across a range of information providers, including government, media, business, and even peers. The 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer spotlighted the infodemic and eroding trust in the U.S. in the voices of public health, the public sector, and media. This is a global challenge as well,

“Compare digital health to airlines, cruise lines, and other industries” and the sector looks quite privileged, opined Matthew Holt in a discussion on a study diving deeply into the State of Digital Health, conducted by Catalyst @ Health 2.0 and sponsored by WIPFLI.. The research was conducted among 335 respondents, which included 182 digital health companies polled between November 2020 and March 2021. Digital health companies represented 60% of the sample, the other 40% of which were consulting firms, subsidiaries of providers/payers/life science companies and tech corporations, and investors. As Matthew called out, the digital health sector has a relatively

The coronavirus pandemic exposed weaknesses in the U.S. health care system that existed before the public health crisis. What lessons can be learned from the COVID-19 stress-test to build American health care back better? The National Academy of Medicine is publishing nine reports addressing health stakeholder segments impacted and re-shaped by COVID-19 — for public health, quality and safety, health care payers, clinicians, research, patients-families-communities, health product manufacturers, digital health, and care systems. The report on health care systems and providers was released this week:  COVID-19 Impact Assessment: Lessons Learned and Compelling Needs was authored by experts on the front-line

Physicians in the U.S. are experiencing “death by 1,000 cuts,” according to the 2021 Medscape Physician Burnout & Suicide Report. Medscape polled 12,339 physicians representing over 29 specialties between late August and early November 2020 to gauge their feelings about work and life in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. Medscape researched its first Physician Lifestyle Report in 2012. That research focused on physician “happiness” and work-life satisfaction. In 2013, the issue of burnout was called out on the cover of the report, shown here with the question, “does burnout affect lifestyle?” In 2015, the Physician Lifestyle Report was titled,

Each year, Americans rank nurses as the most honest and ethical professionals along, generally followed by doctors and pharmacists. In the middle of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S., grade school teachers join the three medical professions in the annual Gallup Poll on the top-ranked professions for honest and ethical behavior in America as we enter 2021 with many U.S. hospitals’ intensive care units at full capacity….and schools largely emptied of students. The three health care professions scored their highest marks ever achieved in this Gallup Poll, which has been assessing honesty and ethics in America since 1999. Nurses are

Two in three U.S. consumers skipped or delayed getting in-person medical care in 2020. One in 2 people had a telehealth visit int he last year. Most would use virtual care again. The coronavirus pandemic has mind-shifted how patients envision a health care visit. Today, most consumers prefer the idea of getting health care at home compared with going to a doctor’s office. Most Americans also like the idea of recovering at home instead of at a medical facility after a major medical event, according to the report, Health-at-Home 2020: The New Standard of Care Delivery from CareCentrix. COVID-19 has

Until 2016, physicians’ voting rates in U.S. elections had not changed since the late 1970s. Then in 2018, two years into President Donald Trump’s four-year term, the mid-term elections drove U.S. voters to the election polls…including health care providers. Based on the volume and intensity of medical professional societies’ editorials on the 2020 Presidential Election, we may be in an inflection-curve moment for greater clinician engagement in politics as doctors and nurses take claim of their health citizenship. A good current example of this is an essay published in the AMA’s website asserting, “Why it’s okay for doctors to ask

In May 2020, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) re-visited the acronym, “PPE.” As OED evolves the definition of PPE, the wordsmiths could borrow from OSHA’s website, noting that PPE, “is equipment worn to minimize exposure to hazards that cause serious workplace injuries and illnesses. These injuries and illnesses may result from contact with chemical, radiological, physical, electrical, mechanical, or other workplace hazards. Personal protective equipment may include items such as gloves, safety glasses and shoes, earplugs or muffs, hard hats, respirators, or coveralls, vests and full body suits.” Perhaps Definition 3 in the OED could be updated by a blog

In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, two certainties emerge in the lives of physicians: they are generating less revenue, and they have adopted more virtual care in practices. The Physicians Foundation surveyed 3,513 physicians in July 2020 on their perspectives on COVID-19 and how the pandemic has impacted practices and patients. This study is part one of three conducted by the Foundation this year, subtitled the “COVID-19 Impact Edition” of the 2020 Survey of America’s Physicians which the Foundation conducts each year. Merritt Hawkins conducted the study on behalf of the Foundation, shifting the focus to the pandemic. This

Welcome back to my ABCovid-19 Journal, which I created/curated in the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic. This week, I’m sharing all the letters of the alphabet with you which reminded me keywords and themes emerging as we were learning about this dastardly public health threat beginning early in 2020. In today’s Health Populi blog I bring you letters “K” through “O,” continuing through the rest of the alphabet tomorrow and Friday while I’m on a lake-side holiday that’s good for mind, body, and spirit. K is for Kirkland, Washington state In the U.S., one of the earliest hotspots for

U.S. consumers were re-shapen by the 2008 Recession in two key ways: people took on more self-service DIY daily life-flows, seeking self-sufficiency and less dependence on institutions; and, consumers became more value-sensitive both in terms of financial value and personal values. As Americans confront the clinical and fiscal realities of the coronavirus in the U.S., the trust people feel with organizations, brands and information sources is shifting, a special report from Edelman explains. In Brand Trust and the Coronavirus Pandemic, Edelman focuses its trust lens on the pandemic and consumers’ shaken confidence in business and government institutions. These findings have

More U.S. doctors are using digital health tools in patient care, with quickening adoption of telehealth and remote monitoring technology, according to a study from the American Medical Association (AMA). This survey, conducted in 2019 among 1,359 U.S. physicians, follows up AMA’s research conducted in 2016 and largely reflects the original questionnaire to be able to understand real changes among doctors’ use of tech in practice. As part of this rigorous study design, AMA used particular definitions for the seven tools the study gauged: remote monitoring for efficiency, remote monitoring and management for improved care, clinical decision support, patient engagement,

Most people dealing with chronic conditions, and those who care for them, believe that “home is where the health is,” according to a survey about the “21st century house call” from CareMore Health. To gain peoples’ perspectives on health care at home and chronic disease management, CareMore Health and Aspire Health commissioned a survey among 2,009 U.S. adults 23 years of age and over in September and October 2019. The survey sample included people dealing with chronic disease themselves, as well as caregivers attending to people with chronic illnesses. The definition of that “modern house call” is largely based on the

The digital health presence at CES 2020 is the fastest-growing segment of consumer technologies at the Show this year, increasing by 25% over 2019. Heart-focused technologies are a big part of that growth story. In fact, in our search for devices and tools underpinned with clinical proof, evidence is growing for consumer-facing technology for heart-health, demonstrated by this year’s CES. Wrist-worn devices, digital therapeutics, patient engagement platforms, pharma and health plans converged at this year’s CES, with the professional association “blessing” of the American College of Cardiology who granted a continuing medical education credit for physicians attending a one-day “disruptive

It was the best of times, It was the worst of times, It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, It was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, … starts Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities.  That’s what came to my mind when reading the latest global health report from the OECD, Health at a Glance 2019, which compares the United States to other nations’ health care outcomes, risk factors, access metrics, and spending. Some trends are consistent across the wealthiest countries of the world, many sobering, such as: Life expectancy rates fell in 19 of the

“Bold thinking is great. Bold doing is better,” Dr. Eric Topol introduced his talk yesterday at Medecision’s Liberation 2019 conference. I have the opportunity, for which I’m so grateful, of not only attending this meeting but playing a role as a speaker, a sometimes stage “emcee,” and a keynote speaker. And as an attendee, I learn so much from other speakers, fellow attendees, and Medecision staff all sharing perspectives during breakouts and networking breaks. In mode of attendee (and self-confessed collegial-groupie of Dr. Topol’s), I took in his remarks taking notes as fast as I could thanks to Mom teaching

The last chapter (8) of HealthConsuming considers whether Americans can become “health citizens.” “Citizens” in this sense goes back to the Ancient Greeks: I return to Hippocrates, whose name is, of course, the root of The Hippocratic Oath that physicians take. Greece was the birthplace of Democracy with a capital “D.” Hippocrates’ book The Corpus is thought to be one of the first medical textbooks. The text covered social, physical, and nutritional influences, and the concept of “place” for health and well-being. Here, the discussion detailed the roles of air and water for health. The Hippocratic texts also coached doctors to

When you think “genomics,” your mind probably pictures a human DNA strand. Well, my mind did, prior to meeting with Dr. Joseph Frassica and Dr. Felix Baader at HIMSS19 to discuss Philips’ approach to the tragic problem of healthcare-acquired infections that kill patients. Ever since that conversation, my mind’s eye is filled with images of MRSA cells like those shown here. At HIMSS19, Philips launched a solution that couples clinical informatics with genomic sequencing of bacteria to quickly identify and treat patients that are affected with tough-to-treat infections that, so often, result in death. Healthcare-acquired infections (HAIs) are a worldwide

To succeed in the business of health information technology (HIT), a company has to be very clear on the problems it’s trying to address. Now that EHRs are well-adopted in physicians’ practices and hospitals, patient data have gone digital, and can be aggregated and mined for better diagnosis, treatment, and intelligent decision making. There’s surely lots of data to mine. And there are also lots of opportunities to design tools that aren’t very useful for the core problems we need to solve, for the clinicians on the front-lines trying to solve them, and for the patients and people  whom we

Nurses rank top in Americans’ minds for the seventeenth year-in-a-row, Gallup found in its annual survey of honesty and ethics in professions. At the bottom of the list for honesty and ethics in 2018, Gallup points to U.S. Congressional representatives, “Mad Men” and Women of advertising, telemarketers, and folks who sell autos. Congress-folk and car salespeople have ranked at the low-trust bottom for many years in this Gallup poll. While the 3 health care professions rose once again to the top of the job-trust roster, nurses rank far greater than doctors and pharmacists by a 17-point margin of consumers rating the

In American health economics, there’s a demand side and a supply side. On the demand side, we’ve done a poor job trying to nudge patients and consumers toward rational economic decision making, lacking transparency, information symmetry, and basic health literacy. On the supply side, we’ve engaged in a medical arms race allocating capital resources to shinier and shinier new things, often without cost-benefit rationale or clinical evidence. On that supply side, though, I met up with an innovation that can help to bend the capital cost curve of how we envision and build new hospitals and clinics. This week, I

Using digital health tech is a new normal for U.S. consumers, including Seniors, found in the 2018 digital health consumer survey from Deloitte. The title of the report, “Consumers are on board with virtual health options,” summarizes the bullish outlook for telehealth. That’s the consumer-demand side of the equation. But the tagline begs the supply side question: “Can the health care system deliver?” For a decade or longer, we’ve noted the slow uptake of telehealth and digital health tools among healthcare providers. But the consumer pressures, along with evidence-based self-service options for health – both for “care” and for wellness,

Consumers have health goals across many dimensions, topped with eating well, getting fit, reducing stress, sleeping better, feeling mentally well, and improving personal finances. That’s an ambitious health-and-wellness list, identified in the Health Ambitions Study, the first such research Aetna has published. Six in ten people are looking to food and nutrition for health, whether as “medicine” to deal with chronic conditions, for weight loss or general wellness, which is a frequent theme here on Health Populi. Consumers embrace their food habits as a key self-care determinant of health. Fitness, cited by most consumers, is also a can-do, self-powered activity

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

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

Trust in the United States has declined to its lowest level since the Edelman Trust Barometer has conducted its annual survey among U.S. adults. Welcome to America in Crisis, as Edelman brands Brand USA in 2018. In the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer, across the 28 nations polled, trust among the “informed public” in the U.S. “plunged,” as Edelman describes it, by 23 points to 45. The Trust Index in America is now #28 of 28 countries surveyed (that is, rock bottom), dropping below Russia and South Africa. “The public’s confidence in the traditional structures of American leadership is now fully

Two in five U.S. physicians feels burned out, according to the Medscape National Physician Burnout & Depression Report for 2018. This year, Medscape explicitly adds the condition of “depression” to its important study, and its title. In 2017, the Medscape report was about bias and burnout. Physicians involved in primary care specialties and critical care are especially at-risk for burnout, the study found. One in five OBGYNs experience both burnout and depression. Furthermore, there’s a big gender disparity when it comes to feeling burned out: nearly one-half of female physicians feel burnout compared with 38% of male doctors. Being employed by

Nurses working in the U.S. are number one when it comes to ethics and honesty, the Gallup Poll found for the sixteenth year in a row. After nurses, military officers, grade school teachers, medical doctors and pharmacists rank second through fifth in ethical-line behind top-rated nursing. It’s important to note that consumers have ranked pharmacists and doctors in second and third place in this annual survey for many years. This year, both professions fall below the military and teachers. Nurses have been #1 in this study every year since Gallup launched the survey in 1999, except for 2001 when firefighters topped