A blog covering the health/care ecosystem and people.

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,

“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

Three in four nurses working in hospitals care about the success of their institution — “they show up and gown up…yet only 57% feel a sense of ownership in their hospitals, leaving leaders to expect 100% quality to be delivered by about half of the nursing workforce.” This is the key finding in a study from PRC on the implications of nurses’ dis-engagement from their work. That context puts this year’s NurseHack4Health event all the more essential and impactful.             This year’s virtual hackathon was sponsored by Johnson & Johnson, SONSIEL, Microsoft, and the ALL

Health is “made” where we live, work, play, pray, learn….and shop. I spend a lot of time these days in the growing health/care ecosystem where retail health is broadening to address social determinants and drivers of health – namely food, transportation, broadband access, education, environment, and financial wellness – all opportunities for self-care and health engagement. For many years, I have followed the activities of CHPA, the Consumer Healthcare Products Association, and have participated in some of their conferences. Their recent announcement of a collaboration with Dollar General speaks to the growing role of self-care for all people.    

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

My latest essay for Medecision’s Liberation site digs into the sobering statistics on clinical burnout across the medical professions. From doctors to nurses, physician assistants and other licensed allied health human capital, our health care providers are in a world of hurt. This was initiated with the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic. But the public health crisis, Delta variant, and lack of universal precautions adopted by U.S. health citizens have exacerbated an already-challenging scenario for individual clinicians and the organizations with whom they work and collaborate. But there’s an even bigger picture, and that’s the risk clinician burnout in its

In the COVID-19 pandemic, as peoples’ daily lives shifted closer and closer to home, and for some weeks and months home-all-the-time, health care, too, moved beyond brick-and-mortar hospitals and doctors’ offices. The public health crisis accelerated “what’s next” for health care delivery, detailed in A New Era of Virtual Health, a report published by TripleTree. TripleTree is an investment bank that has advised health care transactions since 1997. As such, the team has been involved in digital health financing and innovation for 24 years, well before the kind of platforms, APIs, and cloud computing now enabling telehealth and care, everywhere. The

In 2021, racial and ethnic disparities in healthcare are a top patient safety issue, according to ECRI’s annual list of major concerns facing healthcare consumers’ risks to adverse events that can harm them. ECRI has published their annual Top 10 list since 2018, when the list featured diagnostic errors, o behavioral health needs in acute care settings, and patient engagement and health literacy — all of which play into this year’s #1 issue, racial and ethnic disparities in health care. In fact, among the risks in this year’s Top Ten list, eight were accelerated and highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic

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

“If you build it, he will come,” the voice of James Earl Jones echoes in our minds when we recall the plotline of the film, Field of Dreams. A quick summary if you don’t know the movie: the “it” was a baseball field to be built in a rural cornfield. The “he” was a baseball player, ultimately joined by a dream-team of ball players who would convene on that dreamy field to play an amazing game. Today, the day after Pfizer announced a 90% benefit for its coronavirus vaccine, bolstering Wall Street returns on 9th November 2020, two new consumer

August 8 is National CBD Day. Who knew? Well, now you do, and I’m going to explain how this three-letter-acronym is rolling into the retail health landscape, opportunities, risks, and other issues I like to cover when forecasting the future of a new-new thing in health/care. “CBD” stands for cannabidiol, which is a derivative of cannabis, marijuana and hemp plants. CBD is the non-psychoactive compound derived from cannabis plants. CBD is being fast-adopted by consumers in retail and regulated shopping channels. One in seven Americans (14%) use CBD products, according to Gallup‘s new well-being research. One-third of U.S. consumers weren’t

The complexity of the U.S. healthcare system erodes Americans’ health literacy, Accenture asserts in their report, The Hidden Cost of Healthcare System Complexity.                             And that complexity costs, Accenture calculated, to the tune of nearly $5 billion in administrative cost burden to payors. Accenture developed a healthcare system literacy index to quantify the relationship between peoples’ understanding of how health insurance works and what a lack of understanding can cost the system. The index looks at consumer comprehension of health insurance terms like premium, deductible, copayment, coinsurance, out-of-pocket

Notwithstanding the head of the AMA recently referring to digital health technologies as “snake oil,” it appears that one-half of physicians is keen on digital health. And scale, not age, matters when it comes to doctors using digital health tools. The American Medical Association (AMA) surveyed physicians on their use of digital health tools, finding that primary care physicians (PCPs) and doctors working in larger and more complex practices tend to be more digital. In Physicians’ motivations and requirements for adopting digital clinical tools, the AMA’s digital health study, “Physicians are optimistic about digital health innovation and its game-changing potential

In the past week, the patient engagement/empowerment community marked two major events: the achievement of 400 painted patient stories in The Walking Gallery, and the loss of one of our tribe — Jess Jacobs. Jess passed away from complications of a complex condition called POTS (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome), made even more complicated by the fragmented, institution-focused (vs. patient-focused) healthcare she received. Jess documented many of her interactions with her health care providers, largely located in the Washington, DC, health care community, on social media–leaving a legacy and evidence on exactly how not to do patient care. You can experience