Digital Divides and Disability – Ranking Health Determinants in a Digital Age: Learning from WHO and LSE
Among 127 health determinants, two rank highest: digital divides in the era of tech-enabled health and care: digital divides that shape a person’s political, economic, and social environment, and the person’s health/disability status. The digital transformation of health and care compel us to re-consider and re-frame social determinants of health in the “digital age,” which is what the World Health Organization in collaboration with the London School of Economics have done in research, published this week in the report, Addressing health determinants in a digital age. The report was funded by the European
Health Information Security – My Interview with Richard Kaufmann, CISO of Amedisys, Part 3: The Futures of Cybersecurity in Healthcare
At least one-half of U.S. health care organizations have experienced a data breach, one-third in the last 3 years, according to Software Advice’s 2024 Healthcare Data Security Survey released in May 2024. Of the health care organizations who experienced ransomware attacks, one-third did not recover patient data from the cyber-attackers, Software Advice learned. Clearly, cyberattacks are impacting patient care. And the growth of home care, hospital-to-home, and greater self-care are also increasing risks for cybersecurity. The growing adoption of digital technologies in healthcare, from the hospital to the doctor’s office to the home,
Healthcare 2030: Are We Consumers, CEOs, Health Citizens, or Castaways? 4 Scenarios On the Future of Health Care and Who We Are – Part 2
This post follows up Part 1 of a two-part series I’ve prepared in advance of the AHIP 2024 conference where I’ll be brainstorming these scenarios with a panel of folks who know their stuff in technology, health care and hospital systems, retail health, and pharmacy, among other key issues. Now, let’s dive into the four alternative futures built off of our two driving forces we discussed in Part 1. The stories: 4 future health care worlds for 2030 My goal for this post and for the AHIP panel is to brainstorm what the person’s
A Health Consumer Bill of Rights: Assuring Affordability, Access, Autonomy, and Equity
Let’s put “health” back into the U.S. health care system. That’s the mantra coming out of this week’s annual Capitol Conference convened by the National Association of Benefits and Insurance Professionals (NABIP). (FYI you might know of NABIP by its former acronym, NAHU, the National Association of Health Underwriters). NABIP, whose members represent professionals in the health insurance benefits industry, drafted and adopted a new American Healthcare Consumer Bill of Rights launched at the meeting. While the digital health stakeholder community is convening this week at VIVE in Los Angeles to share innovations in health tech, NABIP
A Digital Health Checkup for the US – #1 in AI, Meh in Interoperability – An OECD Update
While health care has been slower than other industries to leverage digital transformation, COVID-19 accelerated change — revealing some key barriers blocking the potential for more fulsome transformation, the OECD explains in its latest version of Health At A Glance for 2023 with a detailed chapter on “digital health at a glance.” The OECD report assesses digital health maturity across 22 countries: in addition to the U.S., the report provides details digital health traits in (alphabetically) Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Korea,
Patients Don’t Trust Big Tech with Personal Health Information Much Preferring Healthcare Providers as Data Stewards
Nearly all patients are concerned about their medical records getting leaked or breached, which is The State of Patient Privacy, the title of a consumer study from Health Gorilla with a headline finding that “Patients don’t trust Big Tech with their health data.” With trust the “backbone” of health information exchange, Health Gorilla calls out, we have to face a big challenge here as health care enters its own sort of industrial revolution embedded AI and data analytics across the health/care ecosystem. How to re-build trust with the very technology that can help health care,
Your Home as Clinical Lab: Withings Brings “Your Urine, Your Self” to #CES2023
We’ve all been morphing our homes into our personal HealthQuarters since the start of the coronavirus era. Millions of global health citizens have taken to telehealth who never used a health care “digital front door” before. Other patients adopted remote health monitoring to avoid perennial visits to doctors for managing chronic conditions like diabetes or heart disease. From the kitchen to the bedroom, our homes have become our health hubs. And now, to the bathroom and specifically, the toilet. Withings, maker of my personally favorite connected weight scale, announced U-Scan, a direct-to-consumer lab test platform that analyzes our urine from
Wearable Tech for Health Tracking, Online Dating and Banking: Exploring the “Fluidity” of Peoples’ Data Privacy Views
“The security of online data is the top consideration for consumers across many forms of online activities including email, search, social media, banking, shopping and dating”….and using health apps. A new poll from Morning Consult, explained on their website, explains that For Consumers, Data Privacy Has a Fluid Definition. Those privacy nuances and concerns vary by activity, shown in the first chart here from the study. For online banking, the most important consideration among most consumers (55%) is the privacy and security of their online data. Privacy and security of personal data was
The Retail Health Battle Royale, Day 4 – Tech Giants in Healthcare, U.S. Lessons from Europe
“Tech giants are the primary forces driving digital transformation forward,” and this is especially the case for health care systems re-imagining how health care services are delivered and “consumed.” This observation comes from a new report, Tech Giants in Healthcare, written by four European-based experts in healthcare and bioethics. The 200-page paper details the activities of sixteen global technology companies in the health/care ecosystem, followed by a so-called “ethical analysis” of these companies’ work with health data. The report was published in Germany by Bertelsmann Stiftung, a not-for-profit think tank addressing broad political, social and
The Reluctance of Consumers to Share Personal Information – The Challenge of Data for Health “Blurring”
Health is the cornerstone to our core needs, thereby the cornerstone to trust.” This was one lens on the latest 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer published earlier this month. But trust is in short supply when it comes to consumers openness to share their personal information we learn through a new study published in JAMA, Consumer Willingness to Share Personal Digital Information for Health-Related Uses. For some historical context, the authors (all affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania [medical school or Wharton (business school)] start with HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act which served up privacy protections based on
Health Privacy and Our Ambivalent Tech-Embrace – Lessons for Digital Health Innovators
A new look into Americans’ views on health privacy from Morning Consult provides a current snapshot on citizens’ concerned embrace of technology — worried pragmatism, let’s call it. This ambivalence will flavor how health citizens will adopt and adapt to the growing digitization of health care, and challenge the healthcare ecosystem’s assumption that patients and caregivers will universally, uniformly engage with medical tools and apps and technologies. More Boomers are concerned with health data app privacy than Gen Z consumers, as the chart illustrates. 46% of U.S. adults said that health monitoring apps were not an invasion of privacy; 32%
Crossing the Pond by Plane in the Age of Corona – My View From the Hygienic Skies and on the Ground in Belgium
Years before we knew how to spell “coronavirus,” I gained Italian citizenship while retaining my U.S. citizenship. My family’s plan was to, soon thereafter, split time for work and life between the U.S. and the E.U. Then, COVID-19 emerged as a pandemic the world over, and the move to Brussels in January 2020 was quite short-lived. Now, the plan is in play and I’m writing this post from our home in Brussels, Belgium. Why Brussels? Among many smart reasons, the city is welcoming, our farm-to-table food style is doable, the walkability is brilliant, and the transportation options are accessible to
IoT and The Rise of the Machines in Healthcare
As connected devices proliferate within health care enterprises and across the health care ecosystem, cybersecurity risks abound. During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the health care sector was profoundly affected by cyber-attacks on connected devices, we learn in the report, Rise of the Machines 2021: State of Connected Devices – IT, IoT, IoMT and OT from Ordr. For this annual report, Ordr analyzed security risks across over 500 deployments in healthcare, life sciences, retail, and manufacturing sectors for the 12 months June 2020 through June 2021. In health care, outdated operating systems present some of the greatest risks:
The Pandemic Accelerated Consumers’ Digital Health Tech Ownership As Big Tech Morphs To Big Health
The pandemic ushered in millions of peoples’ first digital health experiences, many of which will persist according to the 23rd Annual U.S. Consumer Technology Ownership & Market Potential Study, published by the Consumer Technology Association. CTA conducted an online survey among 2,409 U.S. adult 18 and over in April 2021 to gather data for this annual report. To ensure a fair sample, CTA drew three datasets for the general population along with an Hispanic oversample and an oversample for people 65 years of age and older. The study looked at 83 consumer technology products and sub-categories, including many directly related
A New Health Literacy Pillar: Personal Data Stewardship
The growing use of APIs in health information technology innovation for patient care has been a boon to speeding development placed in the hands of providers and patients. Using APIs can help drive interoperability and make data “liquid” and useable. APIs can enable “Data liberación,” a concept proposed by Todd Park when he worked in the Obama administration. Without securing patients’ personal health data leveraging APIs, those intimate details are highly hackable explained in All That we Let In, a report from Knight Ink and Appr0ov. It is likely that behind growing health data hacks is the marginally greater financial
Our Homes Are Health Delivery Platforms – The New Home Health/Care at CES 2021
The coronavirus pandemic disrupted and re-shaped the annual CES across so many respects — the meeting of thousands making up the global consumer tech community “met” virtually, both keynote and education sessions were pre-recorded, and the lovely serendipity of learning and meeting new concepts and contacts wasn’t so straightforward. But for those of us working with and innovating solutions for health and health care, #CES2021 was baked with health goodness, in and beyond “digital health” categories. In my consumer-facing health care work, I’ve adopted the mantra that our homes are our health hubs. Reflecting on my many conversations during CES
Do-It-Yourself Innovation Comes to Health at Home – Telehealth, Fjord 2021 Trends and #CES2021
The pandemic has digitally transformed those people who could work from home, school at home, and undertake daily life-flows as health citizens tried to keep the coronavirus (and other people) at-a-distance. “Emerging hand-in-hand with place displacement, activity displacement is simply about the change in how people do things. Almost overnight, school lessons and doctors’ appointments were online. Yoga classes, concerts and weddings were streamed via Zoom,” Fjord Trends 2021 from Accenture Interactive observes. “Historically, people have often been quick to adopt new digital technology and slower to adapt to what it can help them achieve,” Fjord noted. But COVID-19 has
The 2021 Health Populi TrendCast – Health Care, Self-Care, and the Rebirth of Love in Public Health
In numerology, the symbolic meaning behind the number “21” is death and re-birth. In tarot cards, 21 is a promise of fulfillment, triumph, and victory. How apropos that feels right now as we say goodbye and good riddance to 2020 and turn the page for a kinder, gentler, healthier New Year. It would be sinful to enter a New Year as challenging as 2021 promises to be without taking the many lessons of our 2020 pandemic life and pain into account. For health care in America, it is a time to re-build and re-imagine a better, more equitable landscape for
How COVID-19 Mobilized Participatory Health and the Importance of “Correct” Personal Health Records
explained in a new report from EY co-sponsored by the American Hospital Association (AHA) and the AHA Center for Health Innovation. Digital Transformation – Anywhere Care envisions “health care with no address, or bringing care to the consumer or patient rather than expecting the patient to go to the hospital” as a “vital sign” of health care’s changes going into the new year of 2021. COVID-19 accelerated a movement in which I’ve been involved for over a decade, known as “participatory health.” In its early phase in the U.S., Dr. Tom Ferguson identified the emerging role of the internet in
The COVID Healthcare Consumer – 5 Trends Via The Medecision Liberation Blog
The first six months into the coronavirus pandemic shocked the collective system of U.S. consumers for living, learning, laboring, and loving. I absorbed all kinds of data about consumers in the wake of COVID-19 between March and mid-August 2020, culminating in my book, Health Citizenship: How a virus opened hearts and minds, published in September on Kindle and in print in October. In this little primer, I covered the five trends I woven based on all that data-immersion, following up the question I asked at the end of my previous book, HealthConsuming: when and how would Americans claim their health
Health Consumers Keen to Share and Download Data, But Privacy Remains a Concern
People in the U.S. are growing their health IT muscles and literacy, accelerated in the coronavirus pandemic. In particular, health consumers in America want more access to their personal health data, a study from the Pew Research Center has found in Americans Want Federal Government to Make Sharing Electronic Health Data Easier. Pew collaborated with Public Opinion Strategies and Hart Research to conduct a survey in June and July 2020 among 1,213 U.S. adults 18 and over to determine peoples’ perspectives on personal health information in light of their pandemic era experiences. This study re-confirms the current state of the health
Data Well-Being: A Pillar of Health Citizenship for US Consumers
In the COVID-19 era, most U.S. consumers believe they have an obligation to share personal health information to stop the spread of the coronavirus. However, only 44% would be willing to share their personal data with a national database, a MITRE study learned. Only one-third of Americans would be willing to share their temperature, 29% their location, and one-fourth information about their chronic conditions. The Harris Poll conducted the study among 2,065 U.S. adults 18 and over in mid-June 2020 to gauge peoples’ perspectives on health data and privacy. Three-quarters of people in the U.S. believe that data privacy “is a
The Pace of Tech-Adoption Grows Among Older Americans, AARP Finds – But Privacy Concerns May Limit Adoption
One in two people over 50 bought a piece of digital technology in the past year. Three in four people over fifty in America now have a smartphone. One-half of 50+ Americans use a tablet, and 17% own wearable tech. The same percentage of people over 50 own a voice assistant, a market penetration rate which more than doubled between 2017 and 2019, AARP noted in the 2020 Tech and the 50+ Survey published in December 2019. For this research, AARP worked with Ipsos to survey (online) 2,607 people ages 50 and over in June and July 2019. Across all
What HealthyThinker Is Thinking About Health at CES 2020
Next week, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) will convene CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, where over 180,000 tech-minded people from around the world will convene to kick the tires on new TVs, games, smart home devices, 5G connections, 3-D printing, drones, and to be sure, digital health innovations. At #CES2020, exhibitors in the health/care ecosystem will go well beyond wearable devices for tracking steps and heart rate. I’ll be meeting with wearable tech innovators along with consumer electronics companies and retailers. I’ve also scheduled get-togethers with pharma and life science folks, health plan people, and execs from consumer health companies.
In 2020, PwC Expects Consumers to Grow DIY Healthcare Muscles As Medical Prices Increase
The new year will see a “looming tsunami” of high prices in healthcare, regulation trumping health reform, more business deals reshaping the health/care industry landscape, and patients growing do-it-yourself care muscles, according to Top health industry issues of 2020: Will digital start to show an ROI from the PwC Health Research Institute. I’ve looked forward to reviewing this annual report for the past few years, and always learn something new from PwC’s team of researchers who reach out to experts spanning the industry. In this 14th year of the publication, PwC polled executives from payers, providers, and pharma/life science organizations. Internally,
A Tale of Two Americas as Told by the 2019 OECD Report on Health
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
Americans Most-Trust Health Care Providers With Their Data – But Are They Right To Do So?
Americans least-trust social media companies, Internet search engines, and the Federal government to keep their personal information secure. Americans most-trust their doctors, their banks, and their hospitals to protect their personal information. Are people clear-headed about this perception? I pose, prompted by this month’s survey from POLITICO and the Harvard Chan School of Public Health on data privacy and e-cigarettes. The first table shows that major finding, with a view on the consumer’s political party identification. There are interesting results revealed by party ID: More Democrats trust doctors, hospitals, health plans, and credit card companies with their personal data. More
Privacy and the New Health Ciitizen
Data security breaches, access challenges, and privacy leakages plague the current state of Americans’ personal health information (PHI). HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act that was legislated in 1996, isn’t sufficiently robust to deal with the nature of this health information 23 years after that law was first implemented. That’s not a typo in the title: Ciitizen (spelled with two “i’s”) launched a The Patient Record Scorecard on 14th August. The Scorecard was developed to gauge the progress (and lack thereof) of patient information access afforded by peoples’ health care providers. What did Ciitizen learn from this process?
From Health Consumers to Health Citizens – a U.S. Patient Rights Moonshot?
Issue No. 4 of StartUp Health Magazine is dedicated to 8 Health Moonshot Principles. StartUp Health sees these moonshots taken together as, “a blueprint for achieving the impossible.” There’s an aspect of U.S. health care that currently feels impossible to achieve, and that’s consensus on what would constitute a sound approach to covering all Americans for health care as a civil right and whether the nation can “afford” doing so. On pages 22-23 of the digital magazine, you’ll find my essay, “From Health Consumers to Health Citizens.” This write-up summarizes the plotline of my book titled HealthConsuming, which features that
I was invited to be a Judge for the upcoming CES 2025 Innovation Awards in the category of digital health and connected fitness. So grateful to be part of this annual effort to identify the best in consumer-facing health solutions for self-care, condition management, and family well-being. Thank you, CTA!
Thank you Team Roche for inviting me to brainstorm patients as health citizens, consumers, payers, and voters in the Healthcare Transformers series.
For the past 15 years, the annual CES conference in Las Vegas has been my go-to meeting for updating my research and network in digital health and consumer-facing electronics that people find meaningful for their well-being, families, and home lives. I'll be back in Vegas in January for a full week of Media Days, one-on-one meetings, and speaking about my perspectives on health consumers.