A blog covering the health/care ecosystem and people.

Grocery stores are incorporating farmers market-like shelves into produce departments, offering shoppers locally grown fruits and vegetables. Kraft Foods is reinventing itself as a health brand, with   Consumers are shifting away from white starchy breakfast foods toward beans and greens. These are a few of the food-meets-health trends from the past quarter that reflect how American health citizens are incorporating new food habits into overall health behaviors. Let’s begin with the October 11, 2012, issue of The New England Journal of Medicine, which focuses on obesity, food, and health policy. Along with an excellent overview of Obama v. Romney

A teddy bear in the arms of a child with diabetes can change health care. At least, Jerry the Bear can. Yesterday kicked off the sixth autumn mega-version of the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. Co-founded by Matthew Holt and Indu Subaiya, a long-time health analyst and physician, respectively, this meeting features new-new tools, apps and devices aimed at improving individual and population health, as well as health processes and workflows for physicians, hospitals, pharma, and other stakeholders in the health care ecosystem – even health lawyers, who met on October 7 to discuss up-to-the-minute  e-health law issues. Yesterday was

Among factors that contribute to patients’ positive experiences with health care providers, the doctor’s ability to access ‘my’ overall medical history is nearly as important to consumers as the doctor’s overall knowledge, training and expertise. This enlightening data point comes to us from a Harris Interactive poll conducted in July 2012 and published this week. This news is important because it’s National Health IT Week. I attended the kickoff meeting for #NHITWeek yesterday in Washington, DC, held in the Department of Health and Human Services headquarters building named for Hubert Humphrey – an early public health proponent (and trained pharmacist,

I tore out a two-page ad from the June 17, 2012, New York Times Magazine sponsored by Fidelity Investments with the headline, “Your genetic secrets may not be a secret much longer…and we see opportunity.” The ad copy went on to talk about the emerging era of personalized medicine and big data to help patients…and to be an investment growth area. Fidelity has launched a video online as part of its ThinkingBig series at Fidelity.com/thinkingbig which talk about this complex issue. Fidelity is onto something big here. In the first iteration of the Edelman Health Barometer survey, launched in 2008, we

Since the advent of the Great Recession of 2008, more Americans have been splitting pills, postponing needed visits to doctors, skipping dental care, and avoiding recommended medical tests due to the cost of those health care services. Call it health care self-rationing: the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) has been tracking this trend for the past several years, and the proportion of American adults rationing health demand is up to 58%. This KFF Health Tracking Poll interviewed 1,218 U.S. adults age 18 and older via landline and cell phone in May 2012. As the chart illustrates, 38% of people are “DIYing” health care

Some 500 data analytics gurus representing the health care ecosystem including hospitals, physician practices, life science companies, academia and consulting came together on the lush campus of SAS in Cary, North Carolina, this week to discuss how Big Data could solve health care’s Triple Aim, as coined by keynote speaker Dr. Donald Berwick: improve the care experience, improve health outcomes, and reduce costs. Before Dr. Berwick, appointed as President Obama’s first head of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Clayton Christensen of the Harvard Business School, godfather of the theory of disruptive innovation in business, spokee about his journey

Even though Inside-the-Beltway economists have said The Great Recession of 2007 is officially over, it doesn’t look that way when you ask consumers about health spending in 2012, based on results from a survey conducted on behalf of the American Osteopathic Association (AOA). One in 5 U.S. adults is trying to lower their personal health spending. One in four is seeking free or alternate sources of health care. Overall, 1 in 5 people says their health has been negatively impacted by the economy. The AOA discovered that people in the U.S. whose health has been negatively impacted by the economic downturn were

As I leave Asia, where I’ve been for the past two weeks, for the U.S. today, I am reading the daily newspaper, the Korea Joongang News. On today’s op-Ed age is The Fountain column titled, Embracing the do-it-yourself attitude. In it, Lee Na-ree writes, “Making something with your own hands is part of the American pioneer spirit.” He describes the Maker Faire events and the project of Caine’s Arcade, a game developed by a Los Angeles boy who used auto parts from his dad’s shop. Na-ree observes that Americans are ‘regretting’ mass consumption. Health Populi’s Hot Points: I happened upon

Dr. Andrew Weil, the iconic guru of all-things-health, was joined by a panel of health stakeholders at this morning’s Edelman salon discussing Wellness Ignited – Now and Next. Representatives from the American Heart Association, Columbia University, Walgreens, Google, Harvard Business School, and urban media mavens Quincy Jones III and Shawn Ullman, who lead Feel Rich, a health media organization, were joined by Nancy Turett, Edelman’s Chief Strategist of Health & Society, in the mix. Each participant offered a statement about what they do related to health and wellness, encapsulating a trend identified by Jennifer Pfahler, EVP of Edelman. Trend 1: Integrative

There’s a shift in power in health care moving away from providers and suppliers like pharma and medical device companies, toward patients and payers. This is the new health world according to Ernst & Young‘s latest Progressions report called, The third place: health care everywhere. What’s underneath this tectonic shift is the need to bend that stubborn cost curve and address public health outcomes through behavior change. E&Y says look for new entrants, like retailers, IT companies, and telecomms, to be part of the solution beyond traditional health care stakeholders. These participants will be part of both delivery of care

Every patient carries her or his doctor inside, said the great Renaissance man, Albert Schweitzer. Based on Euro RSCG Worldwide’s Prosumer Report – My Body, Myself, Our Problem: Health and Wellness in Modern Times, health citizens globally have begun to take on Dr. Schweitzer’s vision. Clement Boisseau of Euro RSCG points out that people, globally, are fairly schizophrenic when it comes to thinking about empowerment over illness: check out the chart for perceptions by condition and disease state. Boisseau says that people perceive health today both in modern terms (such as feeling empowered to control some conditions), and archaic or “magically

35% of consumers who have been altering their food intake to lose weight are eating fewer processed foods, according to a recent Nielsen Global Survey. This percentage has grown from 29% in 2008. Health and wellness is one of three driving forces shaping food in 2012, according to JWT‘s What’s Cooking: Trends in Food. The other two forces, technology and foodie culture, combine with health/wellness and yield some interesting consumer trends in the milieu of food. JWT’s top food issues to watch are: – Fooducate – Nutrition scores – Fat taxes – Health and fresh vending machines – Gluten-free –

Most U.S. primary care physicians realize the health of their patients is largely out of their hands — with their social needs ranking as important as addressing their medical conditions, according to the 2011 Physicians’ Daily Life Report, conducted on behalf of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation by Harris Interactive in September-October 2011, results published in November 2011. In fact, unmet social needs are directly leading to worse health for Americans, say 9 in 10 doctors. With that recognition, most physicians feel they’re unable to address patients’ health concerns caused by unmet social needs. This has led to most doctors confessing

There is broad consensus among doctors, patients and health administrators that the current U.S. health system is broken and unsustainable; preventive services is under-utilized and -valued, quality is highly variable from region to region and patient to patient, and costs continue to spiral upward without demonstrating value. While these 3 segments – physicians, people-patient-consumers, and hospital execs, agree on this topline assessment, what they see about the future of health delivery in America varies, according to a new survey from the new Optum Institute for Sustainable Health, Sustainable health communities: A manifesto for improvement. This is the kick-off of the Optum Institute, a member of the

Lifestyle, nutrition, the environment and the health system are four key factors that people globally say have the most impact on their health. Underlying these influences, its friends and family who most shape our health, followed by government and business. Welcome to the 2011 Edelman Health Barometer, the third year the communications firm has polled health citizens around the world on their views on health, behavior change, and the use of information and digital tools. Edelman conducted 15,165 interviews 12 countries in North America, Asia and Europe to gather health citizens’ perspectives. The top-line, globally, is that there is a knowledge-action

Apple has supplanted Google as the world’s #1 most valuable brand, worth more brand-wise than Microsoft and Coca-Cola combined (#5 and #6). the other most valuable global brands are IBM, McDonalds, AT&T, Marlboro, China Mobile, and GE. Technology brands have significantly grown in value with consumers allocating more personal disposable income to products like tablet computers and smartphones, even in the face of recessionary economics the world over. Technology companies are now 1/3 of the top 100 brands. Millward Brown, the brand consultancy that is part of WPP, the global communications firm, has conducted the BrandZ top 100 most valuable

There’s cameraphone hacking that morphs the phone into a blood test device. Embrace Labs in India builds an incubator for $25. Micro- mobile payments are financing health care on the ground in emerging economies.   At SXSW in Austin, TX, on March 12, 2011, a globally experienced quartet of panelists shared their observations of working with highly constrained budgets in developing countries during the session, Mobile Health in Africa: What Can We Learn? The answer is: plenty. Doug Naegele of Infield Health moderated the panel, which included Patricia Mechael of the Center for Global Health and Economic Development at the Earth Institute, part of Columbia University; Josh

One of the favorite holiday gifts I sent people this season was Mark Bittman’s work, The Food Matters Cookbook: 500 recipes for conscious eating. Health Populi’s definition of ‘health’ comes from the World Health Organization: Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. So with an eye toward conscious eating as part of everyday health, I headed to two wonderful restaurants on a trip to New York City last week that fit the definition: Rouge Tomate, built on a philosophy of great design and sustainable, balanced food (with locations in

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

Virtually every primary care doctor in Denmark uses an electronic medical record. Danish health citizens can access their laboratory results, medication profiles, waiting list information, and other information through a digital signature: over 1 million of 5.5 million Danes have done so.   This week, I had the honor of kicking off the online health track at the J. Boye 2010 conference in Aarhus, Denmark. I spent time with an HIT guru from a major Scandinavian university hospital; a member of the Danish public sector HIT organization; marketers from the pharmaceutical industry; an entrepreneur building a portal for the growing private health sector to bring transparency of quality,

With peoples’ adoption of mobile phones, broadband, and apps for which they pay out-of-pocket, the new person-centered medical home is…the home. Policy wonks can wax lyrically and econometrically spin models about how to bend the health cost curve. But patients are the most under-utilized resource in the U.S. health system, as Dr. Charles Safran testified to Congress in 2004. In 2010, patients are getting more engaged as they DIY more at-home: photograph development, travel planning, stock trades, and home improvement. So health care comes home. A column written by Dr. Steven Landers of the Cleveland Clinic, featured in the October 20th 2010 issue of

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 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

4 in 5 U.S. health citizens are trying to take better care of ourselves in light of increasing health care costs. A growing number of people are also talking with doctors about treatment options and costs, and searching for cheaper health insurance and less expensive providers. One-quarter of people didn’t fill or skipped doses of prescribed medications in response to increased costs, the same proportion as in 2009. The 2010 Health Confidence Survey from EBRI shows an eroding sense of faith in the American health system, with people expecting challenges for accessing health services and paying for health care in the future.

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,

40% of U.S. consumers are willing to pay for remote health monitoring devices and services that would send their medical data to doctors, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ Healthcare Unwired (PwC). 51% of consumers would not buy mobile health technology. The uses of mobile health most attractive to consumers are monitoring fitness and welling (cited by 20% of consumers), physician monitoring of health conditions (for 18% of people), and monitoring a previous condition (for 11%). 88% of physicians would like to see patients monitoring various parameters at home, their highest priorities being weight (65%), blood sugar (61%), vital signs like blood pressure (57%),

More patients find doctor is not in, NPR asserted on August 30, 2010, as part of its ongoing series covering the primary care shortage in America. To understand why this statement is so important, let’s go back to the definition of “primary care.” The American Association of Family Physicians says the domain of primary care includes the primary care physician, other physicians who include some primary care services in their practices, and some non-physician providers. Central to the concept of primary care is the patient, according to AAFP. Thus, the first definition of primary care, AAFP says, is “care provided by physicians specifically

The Affordable Care Act (ACA), aka health reform, will move 32+ million Americans to the insured population, and looks to the primary care ‘front-end’ of health care delivery to take in these newly-covered patients. Today’s USA Today reports on the primary care shortage in America. How to reconcile the influx of new patients in the U.S. health system with the deficit of primary care providers? First, the Community Health Center is one part of the solution to the primary care supply challenge. Furthermore, CHCs are integrated into ACA, seen as a key component for redesigning American health care delivery to improve quality, lower

WellDoc received approval from the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) on August 2 2010 to market the company’s DiabetesManager system. This signals the regulator’s openness to mobile health solutions — a market moment that may usher in the new-and-improved era of personal health management. DiabetesManager uses the mobile phone as a platform for patients with Type 2 diabetes to gather, store and communicate personal health data such as blood glucose measurements; these data then feed into WellDoc’s algorithms that communicate personalized health coaching support back to patients in real-time. This process creates a closed-loop system that helps bolster patients’ decisions and behaviors throughout the day. Health

Welcome, HolaDoctor, to the growing roster of consumer-facing health portals. La differencia, this time, is that HolaDoctor is an entirely Spanish-speaking website of comprehensive health information. The site focuses on health content and tools highly targeted to Hispanics and health issues of most concern. Known previously as DrTango, founded in 1999, HolaDoctor has at least 1.3 million Hispanic consumers who have registered on its site, and operates over 500 multilingual health websites under its corporate umbrella. The morphing from DrTango to HolaDoctor has to do with the organization’s launch of its consumer-focused health and wellness portal reaching out to Spanish speakers in the

Two weeks ago, I bought a package containing 100 caplets of Tylenol PM caplets from my grocery store’s pharmacy aisle. I checked the lot number marked on the box against the list on the McNeil consumer healthcare website, and my lot appears to be fine. Today, Avandia, the prescription drug that treats diabetes, hit the headlines of the world’s major newspapers: Avandia Panel Hints At Doubts of Credibility, says the New York Times Avandia Hearings To Reveal True Dangers of Popular Drug, according to FOXNews GlaxoSmithKline Hid Negative Avandia Data: Lawmakers, reads ABC News Glaxo to Pay $460 million in Avandia Settlement, notes Reuters. And there’s also

  Among seven developed countries – Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States of America — it’s the U.S. that ranks dead last in the effectiveness of the nation’s health system. In particular, the U.S. rates poorly on the issues of coordination of health care, cost-related problems causing access challenges for health citizens, efficiency, equity, and long/healthy/productive lives for citizens. Of course, it also figures in that the U.S. spends more per capita on health care than any other country on the planet: $7,290 per person compared with Health Nation #1, the Netherlands, which

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

There’s good news and bad news when it comes to living longer: the good news is, yes, you’ve lived a healthier life and thus, you’re living a longer life. The bad news is that your lifetime health costs are greater than those for a person who’s not had good health. While current health costs for healthy retirees are lower than those for the unhealthy, the lifetime health costs for healthy people are higher. This finding comes from a study asking the question, Does Staying Healthy Reduce Your Lifetime Health Care Costs?, from the Center for Retirement Research (CRR) at Boston College. Here

  Did you ever play the whac-a-mole game? As Wikipedia describes it, “A typical Whac-A-Mole machine consists of a large, waist-level cabinet with five holes in its top and a large, soft, black mallet. Each hole contains a single plastic mole and the machinery necessary to move it up and down. Once the game starts, the moles will begin to pop up from their holes at random. The object of the game is to force the individual moles back into their holes by hitting them directly on the head with the mallet, thereby adding to the player’s score.”   Health care

Health care delivered in today’s model can be thought of as a mass market product. There’s not much customization, even though to each of us, our health is extremely personal to us.   Welcome to the emerging era of personalized medicine: “the right treatment for the right person at the right time.” This is just-in-time, customized, measure-twice-cut-once care bespoke for the individual.   Read more about this transformational market in PricewaterhouseCoopers’ report, The new science of personalized medicine: Translating the promise into practice.   Personalized medicine includes several segments: Personalized medical care, such as telemedicine, health information technology and disease

Poverty is a problem for all of us…and it reaches across the generations. The health effects of poverty begin in early childhood and persist through a person’s lifetime. Poor children have a higher rate of asthma and lower rates of cognitive development. By middle age, diabetes and heart disease hit the poor harder than more affluent Americans. Among older Americans, those living below the poverty line are far more likely to have three or more chronic conditions than those whose incomes are four times greater than the poverty line. Poverty costs not only the poor, but the overall U.S. economy

Where you live is a determining factor in whether you have health insurance. The darker green on the map illustrates states with the highest percentage penetration of people with private health insurance among people under 65. Note the concentration in the Upper Midwest, scattered Midwest, and bits of the northeast. It’s also helpful to live in Utah when it comes to health insurance coverage. The lowest proportions of privately insured Americans are in much of the south, from Florida west to Texas and into southern New Mexico, Arizona and much of California. The Urban Institute has studied health insurance coverage

We’re #1! is a cheer usually reserved for a point of pride: for a class valedictorian, perhaps, or a winning ball team. But in the game of health economics, being #1 isn’t something to be proud of when the investment doesn’t net out to a reasonable return.   The 2009 OECD Health Data set is out, and this year’s top line message doesn’t differ much from last year’s: the US spends a whole lot more money on health care, and gets a whole lot less in terms of life expectancy, infant morbidity, and epidemic obesity rates which inevitably lead to

  U.S. hospital finances are so stretched in the current recession, infection prevention efforts have begun to be curtailed.   32% of health facilities say that reductions in staffing and infection prevention (IP) departments have reduced their capacity to deal with IP in their institutions. The Association for Professionals in Infection Control & Epidemiology (APIC) has released the 2009 APIC Economic Survey – The Economic Downturn and Infection Prevention, published in June 2009. 41% of APIC’s polled members reported budget cutbacks for infection prevention in the past 18 months, due to the economic downturn. Among several areas negatively impacted that

In 2008, mass media coverage of vaccines seemed more focused on pop celebrity fights, pro- and con-, versus scientific revelations. Will 2009 yield more knowledge and less confusion? 2008 was something of an Amanda Peet-versus-Jenny McCarthy show, pro v. con, taking place on the covers of People magazine and in YouTube videos. But just in the past few weeks, there’s been a subtle shift in news about vaccines toward more solid information. The headline points are: Minnesota children came down with the Hib virus, with blame going first to the Hib vaccine shortage and possibly, too, to 3 in 5

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.” So spoke Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4, 1967 — one year before his assassination.   In this week that’s sure to be inspirational and aspirational, I ponder Dr. King and the state of health care in America.   Health disparities continue to mar the State of American Health Care. “Race remains a significant factor in determining whether an individual receives care, whether an individual receives high quality care, and in determining health outcomes,” according

Anxiety about health care costs tops American citizens’ concerns about health care in the U.S. Rich, poor, insured or un-, 2 in 3 Americans worry about the affordability of health care in America.   So it follows, then, that among those without health insurance, 57% blame their uninsured state on the fact that they simply cannot afford it, as shown in the table on the right. Beyond this group, 30% of the uninsured cite the employer’s role in health insurance: 14% aren’t employed, 9% have employers who don’t offer coverage, and 7% are “between jobs.”   These findings come from

There’s more evidence that green = health. No, not tea, but more green space.   More specifically, access to green space lessens health disparities between the wealthy and the not-so-rich in the community.   Green spaces reduce the health gap between rich and poor, according to a study published in the Lancet, Effect of exposure to natural environment on health inequities: an observational population study by Dr. Richard Mitchell and Dr. Frank Popham, Scottish researchers in public health and geography, respectively.   Mitchell and Popham found that health disparities between the rich and the poor can be halved with citizens’

Stress due to the economic downturn is causing more of us to be irritable, angry, sleepless, and self-medicating through food.   And stress in the workplace is costing business $300 billion a year, according to the American Psychological Association (APA), due to the loss of productivity, absenteeism, turnover and increased medical costs.   The APA completed its survey, Stress in America, in August 2008 — more than a month ago, well before yesterday’s biggest stock market fall in 4 years. The APA warns that the levels of stress felt by Americans due to the financial downturn can wreak significant havoc

A study in Health Affairs finds that retail clinics achieve cost-savings for primary care maladies. However, an aspect of this story illustrates Roemer’s Law: that the health care market suffers from supply-induced demand.   In plain English: the more supply of health services you add to the market, the more costs will be incurred. Or in Health Economics 101 as taught by Paul Feldstein, we learned it this way: “A built bed is a filled bed is a billed bed.”   On the upside: Use And Costs Of Care In Retail Clinics Versus Traditional Care Sites finds that retail clinic

The key to longevity isn’t about taking vitamins or consuming health care or yogurt…it’s staying connected to family, friends, and world events.   That news comes to us from the third Evercare 100 @ 100 Survey which details ultra-seniors’ views on politics and the good life. Evercare surveyed in-depth 100 centenarians. Collectively, their views challenge stereotypes of the oldest Americans alive today. There are 84,000 of them, according to the U.S. Bureau of the Census. For example, 19% of centenarians use cell phones, 7% email, and 3% online date. Google is a boon to looking for old, lost friends.