How BioPharma Can Improve Consumers’ Experience and Health
Patients as health consumers now know what “good” looks like in their digital experiences. People have tasted the convenience and respect they feel from well-designed, streamlined omnichannel retail experiences, and they now expect this from health care — specifically supported by the pharmaceutical companies who manufacture the medicines they use in managing chronic conditions, we learn in ixlayer ixInsights 2025: Pharma’s Role in Improving the Health Experience from ixlayer and Ipaos. The patient-focused report gets specific about people dealing with asthma, COPD, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, psoriasis, and atopic dermatitis with a lens on
One Way to Improve U.S. Healthcare, Lower Costs and Drive Outcomes? “Unvendor,” Asserts Dr. Harm Scherpbier in His New Book
Health information technology professionals charged with selecting, implementing, updating, and paying for health IT in hospital and care delivery settings are essentially the first-line “consumers” of health IT – specifically, electronic health records. But these health IT leaders feel far from empowered and choiceful as consumers in todays EHR vendor “monoculture,” Harm Scherpbier, MD, explains in his book, Unvendor. I spent time with Harm to discuss the book, its backstory, and what he hopes to accomplish by raising the issue of single-vendor health IT and how clinicians, health IT staff, and
The New “Paging Dr. Google?” DTC-AI for Health Care
While most people in the U.S. who have used large language models (like ChatGPT) for informal learning, entertainment, and getting information about products and services, 39% of U.S. adults have also tapped into LLMs to source information about physical or mental health. This insight is brought to us in the brilliantly titled report, Close encounters of the AI kind, from the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University. The principle author of the survey report is the Center’s Director, Lee Rainie, whose name many of you will know from his two+ decade career at the Pew Research Center (and
Think Quintuple Aim This Week at #HIMSS25
As HIMSS 2025, the largest annual conference on health information and innovation meets up in Las Vegas this week, we can peek into what’s on the organization’s CEO’s mind leading up to the meeting in this conversation between Hal Wolf, CEO of HIMSS, and Gil Bashe, Managing Director of FINN Partners. If you are unfamiliar with HIMSS, Hal explains in the discussion that HIMSS’s four focuses are digital health transformation, the deployment and utilization of AI as a tool, cybersecurity to protect peoples’ personal information and its use, and, workforce development. I have my own research agenda(s) underneath these themes
Physicians’ Confidence In and Use of AI is Rising, AMA Finds – Coupling Demand With Many Enabling Factors
Doctors’ use of and demand for augmented intelligence in medical practice is on the rise — with many factors that could bolster or risk adoption on the journey toward AI in the doctor’s office, based on the latest survey from the American Medical Association (AMA) published this week. The AMA polled U.S. physicians in November 2024 to gauge their views on augmented intelligence (AI) addressing doctors’ use of AI, perceived opportunities and risks, and enabling factors for adoption. This study updates AMA’s survey conducted in 2023 and found significantly growing confidence and utilization
Is There an Easy-Button for AI In Healthcare Team Well-Being? Exploring a New PC with Embedded AI
“The greatest opportunity offered by AI is not reducing errors or workloads, or even curing cancer: it is the opportunity to restore the precious and time-honored connection and trust,” Dr. Eric Topol wrote in his 2019 book, Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again. In the five years since Dr. Topol looked for AI to bolster the human-touch in health care, we’ve lived, worked, and muddled our way through the COVID-19 pandemic and witnessed the growing epidemic of burnout among clinicians, the front-line of medical care. I recalled Dr. Topol’s assertion on AI’s promise for humanizing health
AI: Patients Included
“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
Hospital at Home: Prospects and Challenges, and Learnings from Best Buy Health
With the urgent need to identify more efficient and lower-cost health care delivery models, we look to growing evidence for digital health technologies that support the Hospital at Home (HaH) model, considered in a new review article published in late February in npj Digital Medicine, The hospital at home in the USA: current status and future prospects. Clinicians from Scripps Research and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine collaborated on this work, calling out the relatively fast adoption of HaH programs during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. In some parts of the world, such as Australia and Norway, “in-person at-home
I am so grateful to Tom Lawry for asking me to pen the foreword for his book, Health Care Nation, which will be published in late March 2025. Tom, known for his pioneering leadership in AI, has rediscovered his voice for health policy -- and health citizenship. He is asking Big Questions and asking us to do the same -- and act on those insights for our own health, the health of people we love, and the health of our fellow health citizens. The uplifting subtitle: "The future is calling and it's better than you think." Onward!
Thanks to Feedspot for naming this blog, Health Populi, as a top 100 best healthcare technology blogs and websites in 2025. It's gratifying to be in such great company with KevinMD, The Health Care Blog, the Journal of AHIMA and other online resources that inform my health-tech views.