Categories

Tying Health IT to Consumers’ Financial Health and Wellness

As HIMSS 2016, the annual conference of health information technology community, convenes in Vegas, an underlying market driver is fast-reshaping consumers’ needs that go beyond personal health records: that’s personal health-financial information and tools to help people manage their growing burden of healthcare financial management. There’s a financial risk-shift happening in American health care, from payers and health insurance plan sponsors (namely, employers and government agencies) to patients – pushing them further into their role as health care consumers. The burden of health care costs weighs heavier on younger U.S. health citizens, based on a survey from the Xerox Healthcare

 

Telehealth Comes of Age at HIMSS 2016

Telehealth will be in the spotlight at HIMSS 2016, the biggest annual conference on health information technology (HIT) that kicks off on 29th February 2016 in Las Vegas – one of the few convention cities that can handle the anticipated crowd of over 50,000 attendees. Some major pre-HIMSS announcements relate to telehealth: American Well, one of the most mature telehealth vendors, is launching a software development kit (SDK) which will enable  The new videoconferencing option can simultaneously connect patients with multiple physicians and specialists, and the SDK is designed to enable users to incorporate telemedicine consults into patient portals and

 

The New-New Health Fair – Care Goes Shopping

As consumers’ growing financial skin in the health care game compels them to seek care in lower-cost settings, the pharmacy business recognizes the opportunity to provide healthcare services beyond the core business of filling prescriptions. This month, Drug Store News (DSN) published a special section called which profiles several pharmacy companies’ expanding reach into retail health – in particular, re-defining the concept of the “health fair.” A health fair is “an educational and interactive event designed for outreach to provide basic prevention and medical screening to people in the community,” according to the latest Wikipedia definition. But the health fairs described

 

Good Design Can Drive Trust in Healthcare

“The best healthcare must involve kindness and instill trust,” reads the title of a Huffington Post UK article written by David Haslam, Chair of NICE, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. NICE (an appropriate acronym for the article’s sentiment) is in fact not an institution known for charity or do-goodness, but is the organization that is charged with assessing the cost-effectiveness and -benefit of medical innovations — drugs, devices, procedures and processes. Haslam writes that kindness and trust connote “care, community and friendship.” These factors have a profound impact on health outcomes, Haslam has observed. Trust drives health

 

Digital Health in the Skies Over Europe

“A full medical team via your mobile,” leads an article on clickdoctors.se, covering a Spanish mHealth start-up. This, in the February 2015 (Febrero 2015) issue of ling, the Vueling airlines magazine. I am flying from Florence, Italy, to London via Vueling airlines, heading from an art-and-Slow Food-filled holiday to a couple days of work in the UK. So imagine my surprise as I head to work on digital health and food projects in London reading this article enroute, in the lovely skies flying above the Alps. The story begins: “In 2050 Spain will be, along with Japan, one of the countries

 

What Zero Kilometers Means for Food and Health

Italians get the food=health connection as a natural everyday behavior. So it’s no surprise that one of the fast-selling books in Italy’s librerias is about Slow Food – a movement that’s celebrating its 30th anniversary in that hot book by Carlo Petrini, a father of the Slow Food organization. I took the photograph this evening peering into a shop window during our post-dinner walk along the Via Gucciardini past the Giunti al Punto bookstore. [In full transparency, I’ve been a long-time member of this organization, represented by the little red snail icon.] The book has a three-word title: Buono, Pulito, Giusto. This

 

Beauty Meets Pharma in Retail Health – At Coin in Florence

All over the world, people define their health and wellness across many dimensions…physical, mental, financial, and appearance. In Florence, Italy, I happened upon a riff on this last component on “look good, feel good” at the Coin Department store located on Via Del Calzaiuoli in central Firenze. Welcome to Coin’s Health&Beauty Store. The two photos tell a story about health, where we live, work, play, and shop, the mantra for public health focused on the social determinants of health beyond healthcare. Here at Coin, adjacent to the holistic brands of Clarins and other luxury labels, is a pharmacy along with

 

For Health, Viva Italia!

La salute prima de tutto! Health is first of all!  I am on holiday with my favorite person in the world, my husband, and we are Italophiles. He comes by that bias genetically, and I through loving him and sharing so many joyful, enchanting experiences in la Bella Italia over our many years of marriage. The day before flying to Italy, Dr. Michael Painter, Senior Program Officer of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, posted a link on his Facebook page to this wonderful explanation of why Italy ranks as the second-healthiest country in the world, just after Singapore. The rankings

 

Health Consumers Look For Cost and Convenience

In a growing on-demand society, coupled with a burden of more out-of-pocket health care costs, U.S.health consumers tend to vote with their pocketbooks for healthcare based on cost and convenience, at least when it comes to prescription drug demand, according to the Finn Futures Health Poll conducted by Finn Partners. The survey was conducted in November 2015 among 1,000 U.S. online adults. 51% of consumers have been with their current health plans and primary care physicians for three years or less, which Finn Partners sees as a sign that brand loyalty isn’t a top motivation for health consumers signing on

 

Rural Hospitals in America – Health Disparities, Hospital Disparities

Rural hospitals operating in the U.S. have a higher risk of mortality — closure — than other hospitals in America. The U.S. health care landscape is littered with examples of health disparities among the nation’s health citizens – for example, women’s lower access to heart-health care, Latinos’ higher rates of Type 2 Diabetes, and African-Americans’ greater risks of stroke, many cancers, maternal mortality, and many other causes of mortality and diminished health. A report from iVantage, Rural Relevance – Vulnerability to Value, documents the fiscally challenging environment for rural hospitals in America. There are at least 673 facilities at-risk of closure

 

Improving the Patient Experience in Legacy Health Systems – My Start-Up Health Interview

The so-called legacy healthcare system are the incumbents in American health care — hospitals, physician practices, pharma, health plans, and other organizations that have long-served and been reimbursed by traditional volume-based payment. Patients, now morphing in to health consumers, look to these stakeholders to provide new levels of service, accessibility, convenience, transparency and value — the likes of which people find in their daily life in other market sectors. Those consumer demands are pressuring the health system as we know it in many new ways, which I discussed with Unity Stoakes, Co-Founder of Startup Health, at the Health 2.0 Conference in

 

Building Health Bridges — Health:Further Goes Beyond the Disruptive

Most people in the U.S. acknowledge that their richest country in the world has a broken healthcare system, especially when it comes to costs. A handful of think tanks and lawmakers offer fixes for American healthcare. Now there’s a new problem-solver in healthcare town, Health:Further, and they aim to move U.S. health forward by building bridges between stakeholders in the U.S. health ecosystem. My longtime colleague and friend, Andre Blackman of Pulse+Signal, has joined the organization as “Producer.” Here, we’ll learn more from my (JSK) interview with Andre (AB) about the organization, their mission, and plans to go beyond “disruption”

 

Welcome to the Era of Personal Health IT – a #HIMSS16 Preview

People – patients, caregivers, health consumers all – have begun to use the digital tools they use in daily life for booking taxis, managing money, seeking information — for their health. This is the growing adoption of Personal Health IT (PHIT), and it’s a growing aspect of the annual HIMSS Conference that the planet’s health IT folk will attend from 29th February until 4th March in Las Vegas. I talk about the phenomenon of PHIT and #HIMSS16 in The State of Health IT to Engage the New Health Consumer, a summary of the driving forces of the trend and opportunities

 

My Body, My Self – With My Physician, Say Patients

9 in 10 people in the U.S. believe working with their health clinician as a partner will help them better manage their overall health, according to a survey conducted for The Society for Participatory Medicine. Consumers’ majority call-out for shared decision-making with health care professionals also extends to their self-tracking health data — for example, via activity trackers, digital glucometers for blood sugar, technologies for blood pressure, and food logging apps. 84% of people said that sharing their personal self-tracking health data with clinicians between visits would also help people manage health. That clinician’s involvement is very important to health