A blog covering the health/care ecosystem and people.

On March 11, 2020, The World Health Organization announced that the coronavirus was deemed a pandemic. WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus asserted, “We have called every day for countries to take urgent and aggressive action. We have rung the alarm bell loud and clear.” Five years later, Edelman has fielded a survey to determine what some 4,000 health citizens living in 4 countries (Brazil, India, the UK, and the U.S.) are thinking and feeling about life after COVID-19 — and especially where their trust lies in institutions, fellow citizens, and future public health emergencies. I listened in on a discussion

People define health across many life-flows: physical health, mental health, social health, appearance (“how I look impacts how I feel”) and, to be sure, financial well-being. In tracking this last health factor for U.S. consumers, several pollsters are painting a picture of financially-stressed Americans as President Trump tallies his first six weeks into the job. The top-line of the studies is that the percent of people in America feeling financially wobbly has increased since the fourth quarter of 2024. I’ll review these studies in this post, and discuss several potential impacts we should keep in mind for peoples’ health and

The world would be a better place if we had more, and better quality sleep. That’s the hopeful conclusion from the fifth annual Global Sleep Survey from ResMed.               ResMed’s global reach with the sleeping public enabled the company to access the perspectives of over 30,000 respondents in 13 markets, finding that one in 3 people have trouble falling or staying asleep 3 or more times a week. We now live in “a world struggling with poor sleep” — “a world without rest,” ResMed coins our sleepless situation. The irony is that most people believe

The partisan divide in the U.S., exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, could set the stage for another public health emergency given eroding trust in institutions — especially in media, government, and public health officials. I base this sobering forecast on the latest study from the Pew Research Center which polled people in the U.S. about their pandemic-perspectives, detailed in the report 5 Years Later: America Looks Back at the Impact of COVID-19. Couple these findings with the recent dismissal of public health “disease detectors” working with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and what is currently termed a “quademic” (that

As humans have undergone personal digital transformations, living omni-channel and appreciating the conveniences that being switched-on can bring, there’s a growing demand for “analog wellness.” That’s one of ten trends covered in the Global Wellness Institute’s (GWI) report on 2025 Wellness Trends, and one I want to dig into early this year as consumers are facing growing challenges to our privacy, social bullying, and workforce stressors compelling many employees to spend too many hours in digital isolation and loneliness. To paint the larger landscape of and drivers underpinning analog wellness, I will weave several important reports and studies together, all

In researching several .gov websites from last Monday 20th January 2025, I had an ongoing frustrating user experience in being faced with “404 Error” messages like this one from WhiteHouse.gov. “President Trump’s First Week Hammered Public Health,” Dr. Arthur Kellerman, an ER doc, public health researcher, and patient advocate asserted in Forbes yesterday: “For now, the only health communications Americans receive will come from sources outside the government, such as professional societies, non-governmental organizations, advocacy groups, and businesses, vaccine skeptics, conspiracy theorists, foreign agents and bots posing as Americans to spread disinformation. It will be up to us to figure out what to

                What was Mark Cuban doing “gate-crashing” Shelly Palmer’s Innovation Breakfast? My worlds of content and health care collided in a serendipitous way this morning when, at the conclusion of my annual beloved experience attending and learning at the Shelly Palmer Innovation Series breakfast which focuses on content, media, entertainment, and now AI mashing up everywhere, all at once, Mark Cuban appeared as a late-breaking guest in fireside chat with Shelly. Here’s my photo to prove it, circa 903 am this morning.        Before even chatting about AI, X, and his

What would $5 trillion be valued around the world or on the stock market? The economy of Germany was gauged around $5 trillion in 2024. India could be the world’s 3rd largest economy by 2026 valued at $5 trillion. Nvidia could be a $5 trillion company in 2025, as could Amazon. But today we report out the latest data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) that national health spending in America reached $4.9 trillion in 2023. The full report on national health expenditures (NHE) in the U.S. was published today in Health Affairs, which came off embargo

As a long-time fan and customer of IKEA, I receive daily Google Alerts about the company, from business finances to design trends. When I read this piece on IKEA’s work on a home designed for people who were homeless, I paid special attention to learn about the concept of trauma-informed design.           Thanks to the publication Retail TouchPoints and the author of the story, Adan Blair, for covering this project. The story has lit a lot of lightbulb inspirations for me in thinking through the role housing plays in human health and well-being, and also to

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.

Patients “yearn” for personalized services and relationships in health care — optimistic that technology can help deliver on that hope — we learn in Healthcare’s Future: Balancing Progress and Perception, a health consumer survey report from Lavidge. Lavidge, a communications/PR/marketing consultancy, polled U.S. patients’ attitudes about health care and technology in June 2024, publishing the report earlier this month.                   Start with over-arching finding that, “Three out of four patients believe the U.S. healthcare system is broken and there is a strong sense of distrust,” Lavidge asserts right at the top of

“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.

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 literacy and, indeed, literacy across the many layers relevant for health (digital, medical, financial), is a challenge for people of all ages. The Institute for Healthcare Policy Innovation’s National Poll on Healthy Aging at the University of Michigan focused on people 50 and over in their latest study published this month: Health Literacy – How Well Can Older Adults Find, Understand, and Use Health Information. On the upside, 4 in 5 older people (50+) feel confident in being able to spot health mis-information, the chart from the Poll report clearly tells us. 20% of older U.S. health citizens are

Lululemon has published the 2024 Global Well-Being Report, a study into peoples’ perspectives on their personal health from the company best known for athleisure wear and self-care. This year’s report is titled, The Pressure to Be Well. That pressure is coming from peoples’ experiencing “well-being burnout.” In the company’s fourth annual report on well-being, Lululemon learned that most people have tried to adopt personal strategies to bolster their health, and one-half of these folks are confronting “well-being burnout.” Lululemon collaborated with Edelman Data & Intelligence to field the study in April and May 2024 in 15 markets where the company

“If the U.S. were sensible, weight management would be treated as a public health issue,” David Cutler writes in the JAMA Health Forum dated August 15, 2024. Dr. Cutler, distinguished economics professor at Harvard, talks about “the pathology of U.S. health care” citing the example of weight loss medications — in short, the uptake of GLP-1 drugs to address Type 2 diabetes first, and subsequently obesity.          Dr. Cutler notes that the price of these drugs in the U.S. “far exceeds” that of other countries: specifically, 9 times that of the prices in Germany and the Netherlands

Rising energy bills are confronting U.S. households (and indeed, health citizens in many parts of the world) due to extreme heat, PBS reported on 1st September. But the record heat waves in so much of the world is impacting both peoples’ fiscal and financial well-being along with physical health impacts, ranging from exacerbating chronic respiratory conditions to, literally, risks to lives.                     A recent letter to JAMA, published August 26, 2024, quantifies Trends of Heat-Related Deaths in the U.S., 1999-2023. The authors examined studies finding exposure to extreme heat associated with mortality,

The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) was founded in 1945 by a group of scientists concerned about the atomic bomb — sharing a mission to focus on technology, science, and innovation to, in the Association’s words, “work toward a safer, more equitable, and more peaceful world.”           Nearly 80 years after the organization’s launch, the FAS is focusing on the growing role of artificial and augmented intelligence across the many areas that touch peoples’ lives — including health care and well-being. The FAS published a state-of-the-nation essay on June 27 on Improving Health Equity Through AI.

Health insurance plans make mainstream media news every week, whether coverage deals with the cost of a plan, the cost of out-of-network care, prior authorizations, or cybersecurity and ransomware attacks, among other front-page issues. This week, AHIP (the acronym for the industry association of America’s Health Insurance Plans) is convening in Las Vegas for its largest annual 2024 meeting. We expect at least 2,400 attendees registered for the meeting, and they’ll not just be representing the health insurance industry itself; folks will attend #AHIP2024 from other industry segments including pharmaceuticals, technology, hospitals and health systems, and the investment and financial services

“Motherhood is the exquisite inconvenience of being another person’s everything” is a quote I turn to when I think about my own Mom and the remarkable women in my life raising children. With Mother’s Day soon approaching, the 2024 Women’s Wellness Index reminds us that the act of “being another person’s everything” has its cost. The Index, sponsored by PYMNTS in collaboration with CareCredit, was built on survey responses from 10,045 U.S. consumers fielded in November-December 2023. The study gauged women’s perspectives on finances, family, social life impacts on health and well-being.           My key takeaway from

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

Whether you’re a patient or a physician in the U.S., you’re burned out, tapped out, stressed out, timed out. While the 118th U.S. Congress can’t agree on much before the 2024 summer recess, there’s one bipartisan stroke of political pens in Washington, DC, that could provide some satisfaction for both patients and doctors: bring telehealth back to patients and providers permanently. Those pens would do two things to modernize American health care for both patients and doctors: first, Congress would pass the CONNECT for Health Act (HR 4189. S 2016) and second, re-introduce and sign the Telehealth Modernization Act.   

“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

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 “rebel” is both a noun and a verb. As a noun, Merriam-Webster tells us that a rebel is a person who opposes or takes up arms against a government or a ruler. As a verb, “to rebel” is to oppose or disobey one in authority or control, or otherwise renounce and resist by force the authority of one’s government.” An additional definition of the verb is, “to feel or exhibit anger or revulsion.” If you’ve been a patient facing a diagnosis of an illness, whether rare or common, you may well have felt these various feelings stirring inside your self.

You’ve heard of food-as-medicine and exercise-as-medicine. Now we see the emergence of telecomms-as-medicine — or more specifically, a driver of health, access, and empowerment. Elevance Health, the health plan organization serving 117 million members, launched a program to channel mobile phones and data plans into the hands of some Medicaid plan enrollees, explained in the organization’s press release on the program. To implement this program and get connectivity into consumers’ hands and homes, Elevance Health is collaborating with several telecomms companies including Verizon, AT&T, Samsung, and T-Mobile. Funding is supported by the FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program.        

The cost of living ranks top in U.S. voters’ minds among many issues Americans are feeling and following in late 2023. A close second in line is affordability of health care, as consumers’ household budgets must make room for paying medical bills — with prescription drug costs also very important as a discussion topic for 2024 Presidential candidates, we learn from the latest KFF Health Tracking Poll published 1 December. The monthly study focused on U.S. voters’ top issues and perspectives on the health system and care approaching the new year of 2024. KFF fielded the study among 1,301 U.S.

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

Today 11th October is National Burn Awareness Day 2023, and I’m supporting the effort for all of us to #BeBurnsAware.             I have become more bullish on Burn Awareness as I’ve come to learn more about the impact burns have on public, family, and children’s health globally. My teacher for better understanding burns and public health has been Krissie Stiles, a long-time burns nurse specialist and Ambassador to the Children’s Burns Trust in the UK. Meet Krissie. Burns are a global public health challenge, which I detailed here in Health Populi earlier this year. Today

“I’m in Berlin, and we don’t like walls,” Bart De Witte responded in a concluding Q&A session yesterday at the 2nd Symposium on the Future of Health Systems, convened by the World Health Organization (WHO) in Porto on 5th September.               Over two days, this meeting convened stakeholders focused on WHO’s European Region to support the Organization’s digital health action plan for 2023-2030 – which fosters cross-nation health planning covering the EU space. AI’s promise in health care to automate and streamline administration, and augment diagnosis and treatment, comes with accompanying risks that can

Appreciation for public health in America tends to be a local-love thing, according to research from the de Beaumont Foundation.              The COVID-19 pandemic raised health citizens’ awareness of the role and importance of public health — and for 7 in 10 people in the U.S., inspired a favorable opinion of their local public health officials, de Beaumont found. the Foundation’s President and CEO, Briant Castrucci, DrPH, observed, “The shared pandemic experience seems to have driven deeper familiarity with and support of public health departments and officials, along with a stronger understanding of the important

This weekend’s Wall Street Journal Saturday/Sunday edition featured a big story on the economic force of women in the summer of 2023, termed “the women’s multiplier effect” — that women’s spending is a powerful force in the U.S. economy (and as it turns out, in Sweden’s economy as well).                 The article was titled, “Women Own This Summer. The Economy Proves It,” and featured a Photoshopped image in various shades of pink with Margot Robbie as Barbie in the center, flanked by Beyonce to the left and Taylor Swift to the right. I’m

With consumer and prescriber interest in GLP-1 receptor agonist drugs “soaring,” health plan managers have a new source of financial stress and clinical questions on their to-do list. A team of Virta Health leaders held a webinar on 13th July 2023 to explain the results of a study the company just completed assessing health plan execs’ current views on Ozempic and other GLP-1 medicines with a view on both clinical outcomes and cost implications for this growing category of drugs that address diabetes and obesity.             Indeed, diabetes and obesity are top health concerns among the

What if we asked an artist to re-imagine what health care could be? How might Van Gogh redesign a patient room akin to his room at Arles, or Michelangelo re-think general surgery? How might Thoreau take us on a nature walk for our mental health, or Basquiat channel his inner Da Vinci for a version of Jean-Michel’s Anatomy? In her new book, Artists Remaking Medicine. Emily Peters confronts health care’s paralyzing complexity (her words in the introduction) to invite a community of artists and artful thinkers to share their visions for remaking health care.             

The technologies that will drive the Fourth Industrial Revolution have health baked into most of them, based on the Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2023, a flagship report from the World Economic Forum,                   Two of the ten technologies making up this forecast directly speak to health and health care” AI-facilitated healthcare, and The metaverse for mental health. But seven of the remaining eight all address health somewhere in their discussions, and even the tenth non-obvious tech — #3, sustainable aviation fuel — would resonate with many researchers working on the opportunity

It’s time for the annual ASCO conference, currently convening the American Society for Clinical Oncology in Chicago. Starting 2nd June, there have been dozens of positive announcements updating research and therapies bringing hope to the 2 million new patients who will be diagnosed with cancer in the U.S. in 2023, and millions of more people worldwide. Just in time for #ASCO2023, the IQVIA Institute published their annual report on Global Oncology Trends 2023 – Outlook to 2027, an update featuring pipelines, therapy approvals, research updates, costs of oncology products, and patients.                  

Reviewing the annual 2023 report from the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science discussing The Use of Medicines in the U.S. is always a detailed, deep, and insightful dive into the state of prescription drugs. It’s a volume speaking volumes on the current picture of prescribed meds, spending and revenues, health care utilization trends, and a forecast looking out to 2027. In my read of this year’s review, I see a flashing light for U.S. health care: “Wake up, public health!” I’ve pulled out a few of the data points that speak to me about population health, prevention and early

The COVID-19 pandemic re-shaped European Union leaders to reimagine healthcare, public health, and health citizenship in the EU. Welcome to #HealthUnion, the hashtag that the European Commission has adopted with the vision of assuring access to medicines for all people living in the 27-nation EU area — regardless of socioeconomic status.             On 26th April 2023, the EC unveiled the most significant reforms for the region’s pharmaceutical industry in twenty years. It’s really a package or “toolkit” in the words of EC Health and Food Safety Commissioner Stella Kyriakides for addressing several strategic health pillars

Food is a basic need, fundamental to our lives and well-being. And for millions of people around the world, and innumerable health citizens in the U.S., food security is part of daily life in 2023. Furthermore, as the U.S. Congress faces voting on the debt ceiling, the issue of SNAP benefits for nutritional assistance (aka “food stamps”) has been identified as a negotiating line-item by certain Federal budget-cut minded folks. That’s why the Food Is Medicine Initiative, launched collaboratively between the American Heart Association and The Rockefeller Foundation, is so timely and welcome.         “The vision for

The United Nations (UN) convened the 2023 Water Conference convened March 22-24, 2023, in New York City. The meeting brought together stakeholders from all over the world to brainstorm how to meet UN sustainability development goals (SDGs) for #6 of the 17 SDGs addressing clean water and sanitation. This event was billed in the words of the conveners, a “watershed moment to tackle the global water crisis and ensure a water-secure future.”                 That water-secure future is a critical factor in the well-being for both people and Planet Earth, quantified in the first

If your organization serves health consumers, patients, and caregivers, and you’re asking them to spend money on your services or products, then you’ll do well to be clear on your values and sense of purpose. In the latest Ipsos look into the future of “Purpose,” we find that consumers look most to health and pharmacy companies for shared values, compared with other industries people patronize such as food and grocery, technology and banks.                   To understand where Ipsos is coming from on this aspect of ESG, we’ll start with their territory map

The phenomenon of Deaths of Despair is the short-hand name for rising mortality among certainly people living in the U.S. due to overdose, accidents, and suicide. Angus Deaton and Anne Case published their first of many research papers on Deaths of Despair in 2015. Their research uncovered the risks of dying a Death of Despair to be higher among men, especially those between the ages of 25 and 64. But mortality isn’t only going in the wrong direction for those people most closely associated with the Deaths of Despair demographic: there’s another life-span line graph moving in the wrong direction,

I am grateful to have been given the opportunity to brainstorm omnichannel health care for people to enable better health care for all, anywhere and everywhere, with Team Microsoft. Key opinion leader Molly McCarthy and I covered a lot of ground in this webcast conversation as part of Microsoft’s series of three “Expert  perspectives on trends driving change in healthcare.”             Molly and I covered a lot of ground here, starting with the key forces shaping and accelerating virtual care across the continuum. While these were in place before the COVID-19 pandemic, the public health

“The future of love is bound to the institutions that have historically shaped and defined it,” Ipsos’s What the Future: Love report begins. Consider: religion, government, financial institutions….and the health care ecosystem, as well. On this Valentine’s Day 14th February 2023, it is a good time to consider this convergence as health politics, financial well-being, and emerging technologies will be re-shaping institutions and consumers in the coming months and near-term.           The Ipsos researchers have been assessing the future of many aspects of our lives over the past couple of years, such as the future of wellness,

For the third year in a row, citizens in most of the world see business as the most-trusted institution, above government, media, and NGOs, found in the 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer, unveiled this week at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.                       The Edelman team conducted this 23rd annual study in November 2022 in 28 countries, among over 32,000 people — some 1,150 residents per country polled. (Note that Russia, studied in the surveys between 2007 and 2022, was not included in the 2023 research). The first chart arrays

“Are we losing the battle against heart disease?” asks the lead article featured in the January 2023 issue of the AARP Bulletin.           “Despite breathtaking medical advancements since President Harry Truman declared war on heart disease 75 years ago, researchers have observed a disturbing trend that started in 2009: America’s death rate from heart-related conditions is climbing again,” the detailed essay explains. AARP is in fact a very visible stakeholder in the 2023 CES, collaborating on the AgeTech content track at the tech conference. The track covers all aspects of aging well, from financial health to entertainment,

People are sick of being sick, the New York Times tells us. “Which virus is it?” the title of the article updating the winter 2022-23 sick-season asked. Entering 2023, U.S. health citizens face physical, financial, and mental health challenges of a syndemic, inflation, and stress – all of which will shape peoples’ demand side for health care and digital technology, and a supply side of providers challenged by tech-enabled organizations with design and data chops. Start with pandemic ennui The universal state of well-being among us mere humans is pandemic ennui: call it languishing (as opposed to flourishing), burnout, or

Doctors in the U.S. believe that the medical mis-information problem is worsening, learned in survey research from Merck Manuals. Doctors and patients, both, have roles to play in addressing medical misinformation online.                   Less than half of consumers, 44%, said that that there is more medical mis-information online than previously. That’s less than half of the percentage of doctors saying so — 98%, virtually all U.S. physicians, citing the problem. There were several disconnects noted in the Merck Manuals study showing starkly different perceptions of health information online between doctors and patients:

Lately we’ve been talking a lot in THINK-Health’s workflows with clients about trust and health citizenship: how inspiring positive individual health behaviors can initiate a flywheel of public health goodness. The UK’s National Health Service is acting on this concept through a new campaign to inspire people in the Black community to give blood. The NHS is linking the campaign to Marvel’s Black Panther: Wakanda Forever movie launch, which drops in UK cinemas on 11 November. Here’s the NHS video so you can get a sense of the public health message… The call-to-action: It’s #InOurBlood to save lives, together.