Most People in the U.S. Trust the CDC and NIH for Health Information, and Most Want President Trump to Strengthen Health Institutions
Most health citizens in the U.S. trust the CDC, NIH, and FDA, and most people also want the 47th incoming President Donald Trump to strengthen health/care institutions — from the VA and FDA to Medicare, Medicaid, as well as the CDC and Affordable Care Act. The Axios/Ipsos American Health Index, published this week, reveals both concurrence among U.S. health consumers with some striking differences across political party ID. Axios and Ipsos fielded a survey among 1,002 U.S. adults in early December to glean peoples’ perspectives on health, trust, and a variety of health and social policies.
How World AIDS Day 2024 Can Inform Healthcare in 2025
December 1 2024 was World AIDS Day, which was observed by the Biden White House with the display of the entire AIDS Memorial Quilt on the South Lawn — all 54 tons of it. The Biden-Harris Administration announced efforts, in advance of World AIDS Day, to continue to fight HIV/AIDS “at home and abroad.” The press release for the effort noted that, ”We remember those who have died from AIDS-related illnesses—honoring their courage and contributions as essential to the progress made thus far. We also stand in solidarity with the more than 39 million people with HIV around the world.
Peace and Health: A Causal Relationship Explored in the AMA Journal of Ethics
“Peace and health are inextricably connected,” the Editors of the AMA Journal of Ethics introduce an issue of the journal devoted to Peace in Health Care published November 2024. In this timely journal issue, we can explore nearly one dozen essays exploring the interrelationship between peace and health in various clinical, care, and community settings — including hospice, maternal/child care, built environments, and adjacencies looking at the use of psychedelics and music for quieting one’s inner voices. You, the reader, will find your own favorite issues to explore based on your work, values, and interests.
How’s Life? Around the World – In the U.S., It’s the Sadness That Stands Out
A new report from the OECD asks the question, “How’s Life?” with the tagline letting us know the plotline focuses on “well-being and resilience in times of crisis.” The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has tracked the well-being of member nations for the past six years, taking a broad view on the definition of holistic health — including physical, mental, financial, and social aspects of people living in OECD countries. The first “How’s Life?” report was published at the height of the global financial crisis; the authors of this report introduce it saying that, “the
Women and #Election2024: Listening to Abigail Adams
With a handful of days before #Election2024 delivers final voters to polls in the U.S. on November 5th, Americans’ political stress is hitting fever pitches from all points on the U.S. political spectrum. Here is the sticker I am using in my journal today, November 1 2024, from Mental Health America. “Vote as if your mental health depends on it.” MHA has a portal devoted to 2024 Election Mental Health Resources, including a section with “mental health voter merch” to call out the phenomenon of political stress and support the efforts
Health Care Costs and Access On U.S. Voters’ Minds – Even If “Not on the Ballot” – Ipsos/PhRMA
Today marks eight days before #Election2024 in the U.S. While many political pundits assert that “health care is not on the ballot,” I contend it is on voters’ minds in many ways — related to the economy (the top issue in America), social equity, and even immigration (in terms of the health care workforce). In today’s Health Populi blog, I’m digging into Access Denied: patients speak out on insurance barriers and the need for policy change, a study conducted by Ipsos on behalf of PhRMA, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America — the pharma industry’s advocacy organization (i.e., lobby
We Are Stressed in America – APA’s 2024 Stress in America Survey on “A Nation in Turmoil”
Two in three people in the U.S. are dealing with Presidential Election Stress — a significant contributor to Americans’ overall stress we learn from the American Psychological Association’s study into Stress in America 2024. I’ve covered the APA’s Stress in America studies for many years, appreciating the role that anxiety and stress play in peoples’ overall health status and well-being. In 2024, “stress” is a mainstream factor in daily life whether you identify with Main Street or Wall Street. Here was my most recent post on the APA study here in Health Populi,
1 in 2 U.S. Women (“The Bedrock of Society”) Self-Ration Care – the Latest Deloitte Findings
Women in the U.S. are more likely to avoid care than men in America, Deloitte found in the consulting firm’s latest survey on consumers and health care. Deloitte coins this phenomenon as a “triple-threat” that women face in the U.S. health care environment, the 3 “threats” being, Affordability, Access, and, Prior experience — that is the health disparity among women who have seen personal mis-diagnosis, bias, or treatment that hasn’t been consistent with current protocols and practices. The data come out of Deloitte’s fielding of the U.S. consumer survey in February and March, 2024.
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
Healthcare 2030: Are We Consumers, CEOs, Health Citizens, or Castaways? 4 Scenarios On the Future of Health Care and Who We Are – Part 1
In the past few years, what event or innovation has had the metaphorical impact of hitting you upside the head and disrupted your best-laid plans in health care? A few such forces for me have been the COVID-19 pandemic, the emergence of Chat-GPT, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That’s just three, and to be sure, there are several others that have compelled me to shift my mind-set about what I thought I knew-I-knew for my work with organizations spanning the health care ecosystem. I’m a long-time practitioner of scenario planning, thanks to the early education at the side of Ian
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
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
As Food-As-Medicine Gains Momentum, Watch for Dietitians and Pharmacists to Sit at The FaM Table – And A Lesson from George Washington Carver
The food industry, both retail food chains and food suppliers, has found health and nutrition are having a positive impact on their businesses both for margins and for missions, we learn in the latest annual survey on Food Industry Contributions to Health & Well-being, 2024, from FMI. Most retail food channels operate pharmacies, three in five operate clinics in stores, and 2 in 5 of the clinics are health system-owned and operated. FMI, the Food Industry Association, conducted this industry poll in October 2023 among food retail and supplier members, totaling 36 organizations representing over
Ethics for AI in Health – A View From The World Health Organization
For health care, AI can benefit diagnosis and clinical care, address paperwork and bureaucratic duplication and waste, accelerate scientific research, and personalize health care direct-to-patients and -caregivers. On the downside, risks of AI in health care can involve incomplete or false diagnoses, inaccuracies and errors in cleaning up paperwork, exacerbate differential access to scientific knowledge, and exacerbate health disparities, explained in the World Health Organization’s (WHO) report, Ethics and governance of artificial intelligence for health. WHO has released guidance on the use of large multi-modal models (LMMs) in health care which detail 40+ recommendations for
Thinking About Dr. Martin Luther King and Health Equity in 2024
Today as we appreciate the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., I post a photo of him in my hometown of Detroit in 1963, giving a preliminary version of the “I Have a Dream” speech he would deliver two months later in Washington, DC. Wisdom from the speech: “But now more than ever before, America is forced to grapple with this problem, for the shape of the world today does not afford us the luxury of an anemic democracy. The price that this nation must pay for the continued oppression and exploitation of the
An Extraordinary Life and Voice: A Call-to-Action from Casey Quinlan, featured in the Journal of Participatory Medicine
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
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,
Everybody is Stressed in America, and It’s Not Good for Our Health: the 2023 Update from the American Psychological Association
The U.S. is “a nation recovering from collective trauma,” the according to the latest survey on Stress in America 2023 from the American Psychological Association (APA). The APA has been quantifying Stress in America since 2007; for context, at the end of that year The Great Recession kicked in, and in response President Obama’s team put together assistance to bolster the national economy, jobs, and health technology (codified in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act). American health citizens are experiencing a deja vu in 2023 akin to their financial stress experienced in the APA 2008 Stress
Large Employers Expect More Employees Will Experience Prolonged Health Impacts Due to COVID-19. and a Note About Telehealth Engagement
Due to their delayed return to medical services and diagnostic testing in the COVID-19 pandemic era, U.S. employees are expected to sustain serious health impacts that will drive employers’ health care costs, envisioned in the 2024 Large Employer Health Care Strategy Survey from the Business Group on Health (BGH). Dealing with mental health issues is the top health and well-being impact workers in large companies are addressing in 2023. Looking forward, large employers foresee their workers will be seeking care for chronic conditions and later-stage cancers that are diagnosed due to delayed screenings.
Consumers Expect Every Company to Play a Meaningful Role in “My Health” – New Insights from the 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer
People have expanded their definitions of health in 2023, with mental health supplanting physical health for the top-ranked factor in feeling healthy. Welcome to the Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: Trust and Health, released this week, with striking findings about how the economic, post-pandemic life, pollution and climate change all feed mis-trust among citizens living in 13 countries — and their eroding trust for health care systems. While these factors vary by country in terms of relative contribution to citizen trust, note that in the U.S., social polarization plays an outsized role in factors that “make us
What Are Patients Looking for in a Doctor? It Depends on Who You Ask…and Their Race
While the same proportion of Black and White patients say they are looking for a doctor with empathy and compassion, there are relatively large differences between patients based on their race, found in the Everyday Health-Castle Connolly Physician-Consumer study. The survey was conducted in December 2022 among a group of 1,001 U.S. consumers and 277 Castle Connolly health care professionals. As the first bar chart illustrates “where patients differ, “Black people were nearly twice as likely as white people (41 percent versus 22 percent) to completely agree that they would be more comfortable and
Your Grocery Store as Health/Care Destination: Welcome Kroger to the Clinical Trials Community
Our grocery stores were essential touchpoints for us during the COVID-19 lockdown era and thereafter, addressing our basic needs for food and medicines and even social health from early 2020 and since. Grocery stores have been morphing into health/care destinations for the past decade, in the best cases bolstering nutrition, supporting medication adherence and patient outcomes, and helping us curate healthy grocery carts with nutritionists as part of the store pharmacy team. Now Kroger continues to expand its health/care footprint and capabilities, becoming a clinical trials channel as announced in its January 24th press
Of All Forms of Inequality, Injustice in Health Care is the Most Shocking and Inhumane: Listening to Martin Luther King, Jr.
Today as we appreciate the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., I post a photo of him in my hometown of Detroit in 1963, giving a preliminary version of the “I Have a Dream” speech he would deliver two months later in Washington, DC. Wisdom from the speech: “But now more than ever before, America is forced to grapple with this problem, for the shape of the world today does not afford us the luxury of an anemic democracy. The price that this nation must pay for the continued oppression and exploitation of the
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.