A blog covering the health/care ecosystem and people.

One in 3 managers in life science companies — including biotech, pharma, medical device and diagnostics firms — have no plans to engage with online social networks, according to a survey conducted by Deloitte. The key reasons for shying away from social networks include lack of guidelines offered by the Food & Drug Administration (FDA), concerns about consumer privacy, and low or uncertain return on investment. On the other hand, 41% of life science execs already use social networks, and another 21% plan to do so. There are many benefits for life science companies in using online social networks, including using them for

During the latest economic recession in the U.S., the growth in the number of the health-uninsured was greater for white people and native-born citizens than for others in the nation. At the same time, the erosion of employer-sponsored health insurance continued. The 2007-09 Recession And Health Insurance Coverage, published in Health Affairs in December 2010, analyzes data from the Census Bureau focusing on “health insurance units” in the U.S.: these are defined as nuclear families in the U.S. who can be covered under one insurance policy–the policyholder and his/her family members. The chart incorporates data from the Health Affairs article, as well

Americans trust their supermarkets and local hospitals more than other industries they deal with. while tobacco and oil companies remain at the bottom of the trust-list for U.S. consumers, health insurance and managed care aren’t much ahead of them. Pharmaceutical companies rank fairly low, with only 11% of U.S. adults seeing them as “honest and trustworthy.” As a result, nearly one-half of Americans would like to see increased regulation on pharma. Over 1 in 3 Americans would like to see managed care and health insurance companies more regulated. The latest Harris Poll has found that oil, pharmaceutical, health insurance and tobacco are

Now that the turkey, champagne, stuffing and other glorious carbs have been consumed. the real dessert is whipped cream on the pumpkin pie: the gift of a conversation about Life and Grace. We each have our stories about how a loved one’s life has ended. If we’re lucky, that beloved person had a good death: in sleep, perhaps, or of simply old age with no hospital events or trauma. Then there are the Rest-of-Us who have the stories of long and painful endings. When you’re already in the situation of making tough health decisions, it’s tough, it’s emotional, it’s irrational,

While two-thirds of American adults use the internet (including social media) to seek health information, only 11% use a pharmaceutical company website most often. It is intriguing that 2 in 3 adults who seek information about health care online are looking for information on illnesses and conditions from a pharmaceutical company. But the pharma company website isn’t the top-of-mind, go-to place. In fact, 2/3 of health citizens whose households use prescription drugs say their trust in medications is not heavily influenced by advertising by pharmaceutical companies.  These insights into the new pharmaceutical consumer come out of The Evolving  Consumer and The

In the wake of last week’s mHealth Summit in Washington, DC, there’s yet another bullish forecast on mobile health to consider. The Promise of Mobile Health asks the tagline question: “Bigger than DTC?” Euro RSCG’s Life 4D group, published the paper in November 2010. Survey data in the report followed up its October 2009 digital health survey in September 2010 among 502 American adults. Euro RSCG rightly points out that consumers’ health needs are 24×7: “they take their healthcare needs with them.” The firm believes that the biggest barrier to wider consumer adoption of mobile health is the low penetration of “suitable mobile devices among consumers.” The report’s survey

“If more than 5 billion people in the world have access to mobile phones (not TVs or PCs), then content delivered to or accessed from mobile phones is the best mass media pick for sharing health information,” asserts a report released in November 2010 from MobiHealthNews, The Fastest Growing and Most Successful Health & Medical Apps. Overall, health and medical apps grew by 66%. However, growth rates by categories vary: medication adherence, still a small category, was the single fastest-growing category of iPhone health apps between February and August 2010 growing by 131%, followed by three areas with similarly high growth rates

When four self-described health activists share their personal stories in the same physical (not virtual) room at the same time, in real time, it’s an exponentially moving and learning moment. WEGO Health convened a Socialpalooza event (#socialpalooza on Twitter) this week where an influential handful of health activists met face to face with some people who work in health industries. The result was a fruitful dialogue where both empowered patients and the suppliers who research, develop and market products serving those patients, learned a lot from each other. These Four Musketeers of health activism included  Alicia Staley (@stales on Twitter), who passionately shares her hard-won experiences in beating

Medical drug benefits meet doctors and their patients via mobile platforms: that’s the prescription for a retail health care experience with the consumer’s checkbook in mind, brought to you by Walgreens pharmacy and Epocrates, the #1 most widely-used mobile drug information source among U.S. physicians. In this offering, Walgreens will channel its discount formulary information through Epocrates’s mobile application. About 300,000 U.S. physicians use the Epocrates drug database for prescription information. These users will be able to use Epocrates to check a Walgreen PSC member’s formulary profile against the prescription drugs the doctor is considering. At that point-of-prescription, the doctor can have a conversation with

The oracle (and I use the word here in the classic sense) of health internet statistics, Susannah Fox (@susannahfox on Twitter), along with the Pew Internet & American Life Project and the California HealthCare Foundation, find that 17% of mobile phone users look up health information online — and nearly 1 in 3 young adults 18-29 do so, while between 5-6% of people 50 and seek health information via mobile. The Mobile Health 2010 report tells the story. Beneath these macro statistics are the ones shown in the chart: people who have used cell phones to look up health information, which is a larger base

There are two faces of America in The Great Recession: one is doing pretty well, thank you very much; the other is losing ground, and a lot of it. One Recession, Two Americas from the Pew Research Center is a survey of Americans’ home economics 30 months since the start of the recession which began in December 2007. The recession technically ended in June 2009, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). One year after that ‘technical’ end, though, it appears about 1 in 2 Americans haven’t gotten the memo. Some of the Pew’s survey results appear in the chart. See the

In a ballroom at the Hilton Union Square in San Francisco on October 6, 2010, several hundred people shared ideas, debated, and painted a multi-faceted picture of the NewPatient: the networked patient. The meeting was convened, in “unconference” style, in conjunction between the Health 2.0 Conference and Gilles Frydman, founding father of ACOR, the Association of Cancer Online Resources. Gilles knows a lot about the NewPatient: he’s organized people focused on cancer for over 15 years through his organization, which has helped tens of thousands of health citizens connect to clinical trials, researchers, information, and each other – all seeking to

The ePatient Connections (ePC) conference convened this week in the City of Brotherly Love, my town, Philadelphia. And indeed, the eHealth love did flow between health citizens and organizations that seek to serve them: technology developers and health providers, alike. My flying fingers recorded nearly fifty pages of notes, and these don’t even include two tracks’ worth of presentations — social networks in health and health games — because I was the emcee for mobile health track. However, this gave me the opportunity to get to know the 11 mHealth presenters and their organizations up-close-and-personal and to brainstorm with track attendees

In 2010, fewer Americans are receiving health coverage from employers. At the same time, more health citizens are being covered by government programs, including Medicaid, Medicare, military and veterans’ benefits. The proportion of people on government health insurance rolls increased from 22.5% in January 2008 to 25.4% in August 2010. This represents an increase of about 13%. The proportion of Americans covered by employers fell from 50% to 45.5%, a 9% decline. Thus, the number of U.S. health citizens getting absorbed into government-sponsored health programs is growing faster than the loss in the ranks of people covered by private sector health insurance. Data

8 in 10 people want companies to help them make changes to their own behavior, including getting more physical activity, eating healthier, and reducing their impact on the environment, according to the 2010 Cone Cause Evolution Study. Even more moms — 9 in 10 — are looking for this kind of support from companies with which they do business. Health is top-of-mind when it comes to cause marketing. 8 in 10 people think that companies should support health and disease. Cone’s study shows that cause marketing hasn’t just gone mainstream: it’s been absorbed into shoppers’ consciousness and figures into personal spending

Americans feel pretty helpless about their individual ability to lower health care costs. Most people look to health insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry to be responsible for lowering health costs in the U.S. A survey from Chadwick Martin Bailey and South Street Strategy looks at Americans’ views on health reform and health care costs in late summer 2010 and finds people still confused about how health reform will impact them, and impotent in their ability to lower their costs. American Consumers Uncertain About Health Reform summarizes the survey results, with the top line finding that 74% of people expect that

Most folks living in the U.S. are overweight or obese. In the 20 years between 1987 and 2007, the proportion of overweight people grew from 44% to 63% — and the percentage of obese adults doubled from 13% to 28%. As the chart illustrates, health care costs more than doubled for obese people, as well. This represents health spending on conditions like diabetes, coronary heart disease, and hypertension. In How Does Obesity in Adults Affect Spending on Health Care? the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analyzes the, if you’ll excuse the expression, growth of the nation’s body-mass index (BMI) over time,

In 2008, 2 in 3 people in the U.S. over 60 took 3 or more prescription drug medications in the past month, and 14% of kids 11 and under regularly took an Rx. The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics latest issue brief on prescription drug use illustrates that prescription drugs are as much of American popular culture and life as fast-moving consumer goods. It’s the more intense use of Rx drugs, 5 or more, where the most significant growth has been since 1999-2000, when 6.3% of Americans took 5 or more prescription drugs in the past month. In 2007-8, the proportion

Detractors of direct-to-consumer advertising (DTC) contend that the ads promote consumers asking for pills they don’t often need, medicalize normal life conditions (such as menopause and sleeplessness), and drive up unnecessary medical spending. A team of researchers now finds that DTC can play an important, positive role in motivating health consumers to adopt healthy behaviors. “The intention to engage in healthy lifestyles was strengthened by exposure to familial risk cues in DTC ads and this effect was mediated through enhanced efficacy to take healthy actions,” the paper concludes. Familial risk cues engendered positive self-efficacy. This is the first empirical study that

“If you build it, he will come,” Shoeless Joe whispers to Ray in the baseball class movie, Field of Dreams. Ray then takes a leap of faith, building a baseball field on top of his corn fields there in the middle of Iowa, and miracles happen. Will it take a miracle for people to adopt health apps? A panel, now in the midst of PanelPicking as one of many Interactive sessions for South-by-Southwest 2011 (SXSW), will respond to that question. The panel is called, Health: Is There Really an App for That? Voting ends midnight CDT on Friday, August 27,

Large employers expect health care costs to increase by 8.9% in 2011, up from 7.0% in 2011. To stem cost increases, employers will adopt an array of tactics, most prominently offering consumer-directed health plans (CDHPs) and expanding wellness programs that encourage incentives to healthy lifestyles. These expectations come from Large Employers’ 2011 Health Plan Design Changes, a survey report from the National Business Group on Health poll of large employers. 1 in 5 employers say CDHPs are the most effective approach for managing health care cost growth, as shown in the chart. 61% of employers will off CDHPs in 2011, 20% of whom will

Call them “kinder, gentler,” gamers, according to ComScore: women like gaming as much as men do, but the kinds of games they like are different from their male peers. I wrote about ComScore‘s report, Women on the Web: How Women Are Shaping the Internet, on July 30 2010. The post was titled, Women Are the Digital Mainstream, Especially in Health. The report includes detailed survey data on women’s use of games. The chart here illustrates the Mars vs. Venus differences in tastes for online games: men prefer action, adventure and sports, along with education. Women like online puzzles, card games, trivia,

Now showing in a 60-second spot during the 6 o’clock news: Andy Griffith’s got the starring role in promoting the peoples’ use of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA). Here is the announcement of the ad in The White House blog of July 30 2010. In the ad, Andy, now 84, recalls the signing of Medicare by President Johnson and moves into some details about the good things PPACA brings to seniors in the U.S. The Christian Science Monitor covers the story and shows the video here. This has caused quite a stir among Republicans who say

Social networking is key to women’s experience with the Internet, according to comScore’s report, Women on the Web: How Women are Shaping the Internet. Women spend 39% more time on social networks online than men do. comScore studied the “Mars versus Venus” differences between men and women online, discovering that gender stereotypes only go so far. The chart shows the differences between women and men and their e-retail relationships. In stereotypical “men” categories of computer hardware and software, and sports/outdoor, for example, men and women aren’t all that different — only a couple of percentage points difference at most for these categories. Health has

1 in 2 Baby Boomers born between 1948 and 1954 planning to retire in the first wave of Boomer retirements is at-risk of running out of money in retirement, according to the EBRI Retirement Readiness Rating. The Rating gauges just how prepared retirees are to finance their lives when they retire. This is defined as the percentage of pre-retirement households at-risk of not having enough money in retirement to pay for basic expenses such as housing, food, shelter, and uninsured health expenses. The net risk is determined as a function of retirement savings such as Social Security, IRAs, pensions, housing equity

People with cancer can successfully manage their pain and depression through telephone contact with health providers and home monitoring, demonstrated by a clinical trial conducted among 405 patients in Indiana. The randomized trial findings are published in the July 14, 2010, issue of JAMA in, Effect of Telecare Management on Pain and Depression in Patients With Cancer. In the study, the Indiana Cancer Pain and Depression (INCPAD) trial assessed patients with pain, depression, and both depression and pain. Pain and depression are the most common physical and psychological symptoms in cancer patients, according to an AHRQ Evidence Report/Technology Assessment. These symptoms go largely untreated

Most consumers give thumbs-up to “fair and balanced” information on risks and benefits delivered in prescription drug ads on TV. But online? Not so much. This finding comes from one of the most highly anticipated surveys in the pharma business, the annual Prevention Magazine consumer survey on direct-to-consumer advertising (DTC). The FDA takes this survey seriously and its results inform FDA approaches to regulation. The 13th annual poll was published on July 15, 2010, titled, Consumer Reaction to DTC Advertising of Prescription Drugs. Most consumers find that “fair balance,” which is FDA required for presenting risks and benefits, is indeed “fair and balanced” on broadcast and in magazines. However,

“Insecurity goes upscale,” finds Robert J. Samuelson in this week’s Newsweek magazine dated July 19, 2010, and titled Creativity in America. The subtext is, “how the recession has changed us.” Samuelson says that this recession has been quite egalitarian in how it’s impacted different economic segments of Americans. In particular, all Americans have gotten more frugal, buying more store brands, cutting vacations short or out altogether (with the ‘staycation’ becoming increasingly common), based on data from a Pew Research Center survey assessing The Great Recession at 30 Months. Pay cuts or stalls, job losses, declining portfolios of home and market wealth, and college grad

As the recession continues to negatively impact U.S. business, employers are tightly managing benefits across-the-line, from health to housing and travel categories. Benefits overall are experiencing a downward trend versus 5 years ago. In the health arena, benefits that show staying power include wellness resources (covered by 75% of employers), on-site flu vaccinations (68%), wellness programs (59%), and 24-hour nurse lines (59%). On the downside, benefit programs that are expected to erode in the next 12 months are prescription drug coverage, dental insurance mail-order drug programs, and chiropractic coverage, among others shown in the chart. The Society for Human Resource

Health insurance companies aren’t the most beloved stakeholder in health in America these days, based on polls from J.D. Power, HarrisInteractive, and Gallup, among many others. Nonetheless, within the category, it’s good to be #1, and when it comes to health plan brand equity, it’s good to bear Blue Cross/Blue Shield branding in 2010. This finding comes from Harris Interactive’s EquiTrend study on health plan branding, where brand equity is a metric built on U.S. consumers’ perceptions of familiarity, quality, and purchase consideration. After being Blue, Aetna and United follow in second and third brand rankings. The survey was conducted in January 2010 among

Millions of health records for patients in the U.S. have been breached or compromised in the first half of 2010. Here’s a list derived from an ongoing search via Google News Alerts I monitor using the keywords, “health information and breach:” FedEx lost seven CDs of personal health information (PHI) from the Lincoln Medical and Mental Health Center in Bronx, NY, enroute to Siemens Medical Solutions, in March. This information affected 130,495 patients. The FAA believes that PHI for over 3 million U.S. pilots may be at-risk of breaching, according to a report published in June by the US Transportation Department. The FAA’s

This week’s issue of Advertising Age magazine dated June 28, 2010, includes cover stories about fast food advertising buoying cable TV revenues, car companies changing ad agencies, the Cannes advertising festival focusing on creativity and ROI, and…hospitals and health reform? Why do hospitals and health reform appear on the cover page of Ad Age? It’s the “new front of medical marketing,” Rich Thomaselli, Ad Age editor, calls it. With upwards of 30 million Americans gaining health insurance coverage under the Patient Protection and Affordability Act (PPACA, or “health reform” broadly writ), hospitals are competing for new business, along with aging baby

61% of American health citizens have difficulty paying for health insurance when they go out on the open market to purchase it as individual customers.  A survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) finds that most people in the U.S. who go for health insurance on their own have trouble paying for it. 14 million people in the U.S. aren’t covered by employers and seek so-called non-group or individual health insurance policies. Premium increases for these policies averaged 20% in early 2010. Nearly 1/2 of these people are self-employed or work in small business. The average out-of-pocket health spending for

While 8 in 10 Americans say that their physicians should have access to information contained in their electronic medical record, only 8% of people said an EMR is available to them but they don’t use it. Fully 37% of American adults are not sure their physicians even have an EMR, according to a HarrisInteractive/HealthDay survey on e-health records conducted in June 2010. As the chart indicates, health consumers aren’t very engaged with other aspects of information applications that may be available to them, from scheduling a doctor’s visit over the Internet to accessing the results of lab trests via email. As Humphrey

Medical costs will increase by 9% in 2011, a mere 0.5% less than 2010 cost growth. The fastest-growing components will be inpatient and outpatient costs, shown in the pie chart. 81% of premium costs are bound up in provider costs for hospitals and physicians — the two most significant factors of medical inflation. And Americans will bear even more medical costs, out-of-pocket (OOP), in 2011 in the form of greater coinsurance and deductibles. Behind the numbers: Medical cost trends to 2011 looks into employers’ crystal balls on health benefits for 2011. PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Health Research Institute surveyed 700 U.S.-based companies, small through jumbo sized, to

The most highly rated aspects of living in America are science and technology, The Constitution, quality of life, colleges and universities. What can’t get consumers’ respect are 4 systems of American life: the political system, the economic system, the education system, and the health care system. HarrisInteractive polled 2,503 Americans in May 2010 on how they felt about various elements of life in the U.S. Entertainment, movies and TV also rank high on Americans’ scorecard. Health Populi’s Hot Points: Roughly 2 in 3 Americans rate the nation’s health system fair or poor. While marginally more Republicans than Democrats like the U.S.

From bad driving behaviors to binge drinking and unprotected sex, the health-state of America’s high school population gets a grade of “R” for “risky.” The 2009 National Youth Risk Behavior Survey is out from the Centers for Disease Control from the good people at the Division of Adolescent and School Health, based on survey data among 16,410 young people grades 9-12 who live in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.  As you read the statistics, keep in mind these are self-reported among kids who are 14-18 years of age. Among the most high-risk health behaviors are the findings that: 1

1 in 2 global health citizens looks first to the Internet for advice to make health decisions; then, they look to doctors. This virtual tie for ‘first place’ in health information that supports health decision making is the New Second Opinion for at least one-half of the population, according to data gleaned through PricewaterhouseCoopers‘s Health Research Institute’s Global Consumer Survey. Traditional media, including print (newspapers and magazines) and broadcast (TV, radio) are go-to health information sources for about 1 in 4 health consumers. Social networking websites were found to be useful health information decision-support sources by 17% (say, nearly 1 in 5 people). Health

Today, $18,074 could cover… A new 2010 Honda Civic A year of college at Hampton University in Virginia The per capita income in Waterloo, NY. Or, you could cover health insurance for a typical family of four in America. In the past year, the average cost of health care for a family of four in the U.S. has increased by $1,303, the large single dollar increase seen in the past 10 years since the start of the Milliman Medical Index (MMI). The total medical cost for a family of four is $18,074 in 2010. Employers will pay, on average, 59% of the

In health and health care, the most important stakeholder the world over is…drum roll, please…The Patient/Health Citizen. In this month’s Harvard Business Review, that venerated publication cites 12 megatrends shaping health globally: Aging Personalized medicine and advancements in technologies Medical tourism New provider types beyond the doctor Rising costs Employers and payers influencing clinical decisions Evidence based medicine Prevention Philanthropy Environmental challenges Global pandemics Innovation and demand in developing economies. Where’s the person-patient, Harvard? People are engaging with the help of social networks, offline and on, empowering technologies and tools, and advice and support from each other. People-patients are the 13th megatrend. Patient-centricity,

  When it comes to health plans sponsored by U.S. employers, there are two realities facing benefits managers: on one side of the coin, most U.S. employers held the line on employee benefits in the recession. The other reality: controlling costs is the most important objective for employee benefits, according to most U.S. employers polled in MetLife’s 8th Annual Study of Employee Benefits Trends. Under the cost-control priority, though, is a novel finding in the MetLife study. That is that employers see a link between benefits and employee productivity and loyalty. Thus, when productivity is viewed as a benefits objective, employers can connect the dots

Without trust, health consumers won’t engage with organizations who want to cure them, sell to them, promote to them, help them. Here’s what I told a group of  pharmaceutical marketers at The DTC Annual Conference in Washington , DC, on April 9, 2010. Let’s start with the World Health Organization’s definition of health: that is, the state of complete physical, mental and social wellbeing, and not just the absence of disease. This definition is being embraced by health citizens long before the silos in the health industry – including pharma – get it. That’s an important mindset to take on as

While 2 in 3 American adults with no chronic health conditions go online to access health information, only 1 in 2 chronically ill people seek health information online. This irony here is that those who most need access to online information, support and tools don’t use them as much as people who are healthy. “The Internet access gap creates an online health information gap,” say Susannah Fox and Kristen Purcell of the Pew Internet & American Life Project in their landmark report, Chronic Disease and the Internet. It’s not that sicker people aren’t interested in accessing health information; it’s that

The middle class in America is barely hanging on, and increasingly uninsured. the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s report on the continued erosion of health insurance in the U.S. talks of the recession’s toll on average Americans and employers’ ability to cover their health. Furthermore, two consecutive years of economic downturn in the U.S. have driven two years of downturn in consumer spending. This has led to consumers trading off a balance of price, brand and convenience which Strategy& (previously Booz & Company) calls The New Consumer Frugality. In their latest report detailing consumer spending trends in 2,000 random American adults, Booz

While the stock market and companies’ profitability improves, much of that has been done on the backs of employees: through reductions in force and job cuts, and re-working of benefits. Health benefits are a prime target for cost management as companies try to survive through the long recovery. Combined with insurance companies’ cost increases (most notably and recently Anthem’s announcement of up-to-39% increases in premium costs), employers who choose to continue to provide health insurance to employers are in a bind. According to the 15th annual survey from National Business Group on Health/Towers Watson, employers faced cost increases of 7%