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The Women’s Health Gap Is Especially Wide During Her Working Years – Learning from McKinsey, the World Economic Forum, and AARP in Women’s History Month

There’s a gender-health gap that hits women particularly hard when she is of working age — negatively impacting her own physical and financial health, along with that of the community and nation in which she lives.               March being Women’s History Month, we’ve got a treasure-trove of reports to review — including several focusing on health. I’ll dive into two for this post, to focus in on the women’s health gap that’s especially wide during her working years. The reports cover research from the McKinsey Health Institute collaborating with the World Economic Forum on

 

Rebel Health: The Personal and Professional Passion of Susannah Fox

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.

 

From Evolution to Innovation, from Health Care to Health: How Health Plans With Collaborators Are Re-Defining the Industry

As a constant observer and advisor across the health/care ecosystem, for me the concept of a “health plan” in the U.S. is getting fuzzier by the day. Furthermore, health plan members now see themselves as medical bill payers, seeking value and consumer-level services for their health insurance premium investment. Weaving these ideas together is my mission in preparing a session to deliver at the upcoming AHIP 2024 conference in June, I’m thinking a lot about the evolving nature of health insurance, plans, and the organizations that provide them. To help me define first principles, I turned to the American father

 

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

 

Our Mental and Emotional Health Are Interwoven With What We Eat and Drink – Chewing On the IFIC 2023 Food and Health Survey

As most Americans confess to feeling stressed over the past six months, peoples’ food and beverage choices have been intimately connected with their mental and emotional well-being, we learn from the 2023 Food & Health Survey from the International Food Information Council (IFIC). For this year’s study, IFIC commissioned Greenwald Research to conduct 1,022 interviews with adults between 18 and 80 years of age in April 2023. The research explored consumers’ perspectives on healthy food, the cost of food, approaches to self-care through food consumption, the growing role of social media in the food system, and the influence of sustainability

 

Retail Clinics’ Growing Role in Health Care and Prescription Drug Sales

“It seemed like an odd pairing: shampoo and a throat swab,” observes a new report on the growth of retail health from Definitive Healthcare. But retail clinics are no longer, as the paper explains, “an experiment of a few grocery stores….they’re becoming a major force in the U.S. healthcare system,” asserts the thesis of Retailers in healthcare: A catalyst for provider evolution.                 While the use of emergency departments fell by 1% in the past five years, the use of retail clinics expanded by 70%, Definitive Healthcare calculated. Most retail clinics are owned by

 

A Public Health Wake-Up Call: Reading Between the Lines in IQVIA’s 2023 Use of Medicines Report

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

 

Food-as-Medicine Update: How SNAP Members Face Greater Chronic Illness and a “Hunger Cliff”

The pandemic worsened food insecurity for many people in the U.S., putting more people at risk for not only hunger but for chronic diseases that can be managed with access to nutritious, fresh food. In Helping SNAP Consumers During Economic Headwinds from Numerator, we get a current read on food security, the SNAP program, and the challenges of chronic health management that are intimately tied. To set some context on this current challenge to peoples’ health, the U.S. is facing the official end of the pandemic emergency on May 11, 2023. At that point, support for government-sponsored programs that have supported

 

Your Home as Clinical Lab: Withings Brings “Your Urine, Your Self” to #CES2023

We’ve all been morphing our homes into our personal HealthQuarters since the start of the coronavirus era. Millions of global health citizens have taken to telehealth who never used a health care “digital front door” before. Other patients adopted remote health monitoring to avoid perennial visits to doctors for managing chronic conditions like diabetes or heart disease. From the kitchen to the bedroom, our homes have become our health hubs. And now, to the bathroom and specifically, the toilet. Withings, maker of my personally favorite connected weight scale, announced U-Scan, a direct-to-consumer lab test platform that analyzes our urine from

 

When Household Economics Blur with Health, Technology and Trust – Health Populi’s 2023 TrendCast

By Jane Sarasohn-Kahn on 22 December 2022 in Anxiety, Behavioral health, Big data and health, Big Tech, Broadband, Business and health, Cardiovascular health, Chronic care, Chronic disease, Connected health, Consumer electronics, Consumer experience, Consumer-directed health, Coronavirus, COVID-19, Cybersecurity, Data analytics and health, Demographics and health, Depression, Design and health, Determinants of health, Diet and health, Digital health, Employee benefits, Employers, Financial health, Financial wellness, Fitness, Food and health, Grocery stores, Health apps, Health at home, Health benefits, Health care industry, Health citizenship, Health Consumers, Health costs, Health disparities, Health Economics, Health ecosystem, Health engagement, Health equity, Health insurance, Health Plans, Health policy, Health politics, Health privacy, Healthcare DIY, Heart disease, Heart health, HIPAA, Home care, Home economics, Home health, Hospitals, Infectious disease, Love and health, Medication adherence, Meditation, Mental health, Mindfulness, Moms and health, Money and health, Out of pocket costs, Patient experience, Personal health finance, Pharmaceutical, Pharmacy, Physicians, Popular culture and health, Prescription drugs, Prevention and wellness, Primary care, Public health, Race and health, Remote health monitoring, Retail health, Risk management, SDoH, Self-care, Shopping and health, Social determinants of health, Specialty drugs, Stress, Telehealth, Telemedicine, Transparency, Trust, User experience UX, Vaccines, Value based health, Virtual health, Vitamins, Wearable tech, Wellbeing, Workplace benefits

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

 

Our Homes as HealthQuarters – Finding Health and Well-Being at CES 2023

For over ten years, digital health technology has been a fast-growing area at the annual CES, the largest convention covering consumer electronics in the world.           When the meet-up convenes over 100,000 tech-folk in Las Vegas at the start of 2023, we’ll see even more health and self-care tools and services at #CES23 — along with new-new things displayed in aisles well outside of the physical space on the Las Vegas Convention Center map labeled “digital health” at this year’s CES in the North Hall.         Some context: my company has been a member

 

Home Is Where the Health Is: An Update on Connectivity, Food, and Retail

Virtually every closed-door meeting I have had in the U.S. with a client group in the past several months has had a line item on the agenda to brainstorm the impact and opportunity of care-at-home, hospital-to-home, or Care Everywhere. This has happened across many stakeholders in the evolving health/care ecosystem of suppliers, including hospital systems, health plans, grocery chains, retail pharmacy, consumer technology, digital health and tech-enabled providers, pharma and medical supply companies. On October 10, Dr. Robert Pearl, former CEO of The Permanente Medical Group, published a provocative post on Forbes noting that Amazon, CVS, Walmart Are Playing Healthcare’s

 

The More Chronic Conditions, the More Likely a Patient Will Have Medical Debt

There is a direct association between a person’s health status and patient outcomes and their financial health, quantified in original research published this week in JAMA Internal Medicine.                 Researchers from the University of Michigan (my alma mater) Medical School and Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation analyzed two years of commercial insurance claims data generated between January 2019 and January 2021, linking to commercial credit data from January 2021 for patients enrolled in a preferred providers organization in Michigan. The first chart illustrates the predicted probability of credit outcomes based on the

 

Partnering Up in the Health Care Ecosystem to Drive Transformation – for Organizations and Health Consumers Alike

“Partnerships, including JVs and alliances with other healthcare organizations and with new entrants, are just one way to access new capabilities, unlock speed to market, and achieve capital, scale, and operational efficiencies” in health care transformations. “In an environment with continued competition for attractive assets and significant capital in play from institutional investors, these partnerships may also be the most accessible way for organizations to capture value in expanding healthcare services and technology value pools,” we learn in Overcoming the cost of healthcare transformation through partnerships from a team of health care folks with McKinsey & Company.      

 

Only in America: Medical Debt Is Most Peoples’ Problem, KHN and NPR Report

When high-deductible health plans became part of health insurance design in America, they were lauded as giving patients “more skin in the game” of health care payments. The theory behind consumer-directed care was that patients-as-consumers would shop around for care, morph into rational consumers of medical services just as they would do purchasing autos or washing machines, and shift the cost-curve of American health care ever downward. That skin-in-the-game has been a risk factor for .some patients to postpone care as well as take on medical debt — the strongest predictor of which is dealing with multiple chronic conditions. “The

 

Reimagining Health Care Without Walls – Deloitte’s Vision

Delivering health care during the heights of the COVID-19 pandemic proved to both patients and their clinicians that virtual care was not only a viable channel for care, but very often a preferable “place” to collaborate for treatment. Even before the coronavirus pandemic emerged in early 2020, telehealth and the hospital-to-home movement were beginning to become part of a portfolio of delivery modes across the continuum of care. Deloitte spells out the current and future prospects for the Hospital in the future “without” walls in a new report that spells out driving forces, future scenarios, and impacts on a business long

 

McKinsey’s Six Shifts To Add Life to Years — and One More to Consider

People spend one-half of their lives in “less-than-good health,” we learn early in the paper, Adding years to life and life to years from the McKinsey Health Institute. In this data-rich essay, the McKinsey team at MHI sets out an agenda that could help us add 45 billion extra years of higher-quality life equal to an average of six years per person (depending on your country and population demographics). The first graphic from the report illustrates four dimensions of health and the factors underneath each of them that can bolster or diminish our well-being: personal behaviors (such as sleep and diet),

 

Can a Food-As-Medicine App Extend Chronic Health Management at the Grocery Store?

Foogal, a recipe app designed to support patients’ healthy cooking and eating, launched on 24th March. In its initial version, Foogal addresses several specific diet paradigms: for patients demanding a wellness protocol, an autoimmune protocol, or wanting to address insulin resistance. Foogal got my attention via a tweet @FoogalApp on 25th March. The snippet featured a photo of a delectable Salad Lyonnaise, one of my favorite things to eat, which adds a soft-cooked egg and bacon lardons to the greens for an easy light (and delicious!) meal. Foogal was developed by Todd Knobel, who has worked in law, in plastics,

 

Doximity Study Finds Telehealth Is Health for Every Day Care

There’s more evidence that doctors and patients, both, want to use telehealth after the COVID-19 pandemic fades. Doximity’s second report on telemedicine explores both physicians’ and patients’ views on virtual care, finding most doctors and health consumers on the same page of virtual care adoption. For the physicians’ profile, Doximity examined 180,000 doctors’ who billed Medicare for telemedicine claims between January 2020 and June 2021. Telemedicine use did not vary much across physician age groups. Doctors in specialties that manage chronic illnesses were more likely to use telehealth: endocrinology (think: diabetes), gastroenterology, rheumatology, urology, nephrology, cardiology, ENT, neurology, allergy, and

 

Building Health Equity Through Faith and Food – the Black Church Food Security Network

Members of his congregation kept going to the hospital with diet-related issues, Reverend Dr. Heber Brown, III, realized. “I got tired of praying and hoping they made it and walked out,” Reverend Brown realized. And then… “God gave us an idea and vision to be proactive on the issue of health in our congregation,” Rev. Brown explained to us yesterday on Day 2 of Real Chemistry’s Health Equity Summit. This was the seed for the Black Church Food Security Network, planting a pragmatic vision for health and well-being weaving together local food, civic empowerment, economic development, and faith. “We had

 

Mental Health at CES 2022 – The Consumer’s Context for Wellbeing in the New Year

As we enter COVID-19’s “junior year,” one unifying experience shared by most humans are feelings of pandemic fatigue: anxiety, grief, burnout, which together diminish our mental health. There are many signposts pointing to the various flavors of mental and behavioral health challenges, from younger peoples’ greater risk of depression and suicide ideation to increased deaths of despair due to overdose among middle-aged people. And about one-in-three Americans has made a 2022 New Year’s resolution involving some aspect of mental health, the American Psychiatric Association noted approaching the 2021 winter holiday season. Underneath this overall statistic are important differences across various

 

Health Care Planning for 2022 – Start with a Pandemic, Then Pivot to Health and Happiness

One of my favorite Dr. Seuss characters is the narrator featured in the book, I Had Trouble In Getting to Solla-Sollew. I frequently use this book when conducting futures and scenario planning sessions with clients in health/care. “The story opens with our happy-go-lucky narrator taking  a stroll through the Valley of Vung where nothing went wrong,” the Seussblog explains. Then one day, our hero (shown here on the right side of the picture from the book) is not paying attention to where he is walking….thus admitting, “And I learned there are troubles of more than one kind, some come from

 

Consider Mental Health Equity on World Mental Health Day

COVID-19 exacted a toll on health citizens’ mental health, worsening a public health challenge that was already acute before the pandemic. It’s World Mental Health Day, an event marked by global and local stakeholders across the mental health ecosystem. On the global front, the World Health Organization (WHO) describes the universal phenomenon and burden of mental health on the Earth’s people… Nearly 1 billion people have a mental disorder Depression is a leading cause of disability worldwide, impacting about 5% of the world’s population People with severe mental disorders like schizophrenia tend to die as much as 20 years earlier

 

Chronic Medical Conditions, Mental Health, and Equity On Employers’ Minds for 2022 – Employee Health in the Wake of COVID-19

One in two people in the U.S. receive health insurance through employers. As large employers tend to be on the vanguard of benefit plan design, it’s useful to understand how these companies are thinking ahead on behalf of their employees. With that objective, it’s always instructive to explore the annual study from the Business Group on Health, the 2022 Large Employers’ Health Care Strategy and Plan Design Survey. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, large employees have many concerns about worker and dependents’ health. The biggest firms in America providing health insurance for workers are expecting an increase in

 

Pondering Prescription Drugs: Pricing Rx and Going Direct-to-Consumer

There is one health care public policy issue that unites U.S. voters across political party: that is the consumer-facing costs of prescription drugs. With the price of medicines in politicians’ and health citizens’ cross-hairs, the pharmaceutical and biotech industries have responded in many ways to the Rx pricing critiques from consumers (via, for example, Consumer Reports/Consumers Union and AARP), hospitals (through the American Hospital Association), and insurance companies (from AHIP, America’s Health Insurance Plans). The latest poll from the University of Chicago/Harris Public Policy and the Associate Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research quantifies the issue cross-party, finding that 74%

 

Digital Health Tools Are Finding Business Models – IQVIA’s 2021 Read on the Health of Digital Health

In the Age of COVID, over 90,000 new health apps were released, as the supply of digital therapeutics and wearables grew in 2020. Evidence supporting the use of digital health tools if growing, tracked in Digital Health Trends 2021: Innovation, Evidence, Regulation, and Adoption from IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science. IQVIA has been closely following the growth, investment in, and clinical evidence for digital health since 2013, when I reviewed their first paper on “mHealth” here in Health Populi.  Then, IQVIA evaluated the universe of about 40,000 apps available in the iTunes store. In today’s report, the company quantifies

 

Healthy Living Trends Inspired by COVID-19: Retailers, Food, and Consumers’ Growing Self-Care Muscles

“Self-care” took on new meaning and personal work-flows for people living in and through the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S. Acosta, the retail market research pro’s, updated our understanding consumers evolving as COVID-19 Has Elevated the Health and Wellness Trends of the Recent Years, results of a survey conducted among in May 2021. In the U.S., consumers’ take on self-care has most to do with healthy eating and nutrition (for 1 in 2 people), getting regular medical checkups (for 42%), taking exercise, relaxing, using vitamins and supplements, and getting good sleep. Healthy relationships are an integral part of self-care for

 

The Healthiest Communities in the U.S. After the Pandemic – U.S. News & Aetna Foundation’s Post-COVID Lists

Some of America’s least-healthy communities are also those that index greater for vaccine hesitancy and other risks for well-being, found in U.S. News & World Report’s 2021 Healthiest Communities Rankings. U.S. News collaborated with the Aetna Foundation, CVS Health’s philanthropic arm, in this fourth annual list of the top geographies for well-being in the U.S. Six of the top ten healthiest towns in America are located in the state of Colorado. But #1 belongs to Los Alamos County, New Mexico, which also ranked first in ___. Beyond Colorado and New Mexico, we find that Virginia fared well for health in

 

The Healthcare and Macro-Economic Impacts of Living with Endemic COVID – Listening to Fitch

Getting totally rid of the coronavirus isn’t likely, so we humans must accept the fact that SARS-CoV-2 will be endemic. The economic and healthcare system impacts of this were explored in the Post-Covid Healthcare Landscape, delivered by Fitch Solutions’ Jamie Davies and Beau Noafshar, leaders in the Pharmaceuticals, Healthcare, and Medical Devices groups. I welcomed the opportunity to learn from this team’s approach in weaving together the dynamic issues that help us to plan for the long-tail of COVID-19 and its impact on the economy and prospects for the health care industry and health citizens. The first graph illustrates the

 

5.5 Million Years of Life Will Be Lost Due to COVID-19 in the U.S. in 2020

In 2020 in the U.S., 380,000 people are expected to die due to COVID-19. These people lost due to the coronavirus would, collectively, have lived another 5.5 million life-years would they not have succumbed to the virus. COVID-19 has cut lives short relative to their life expectancy, calculated in an analysis by the Pew Research Center based on CDC data from 2019 and 2020, coupled with additional statistics on life expectancy by age and gender. The bottom-line from the Pew Research Center’s analysis, simply stated, is that, “The pandemic…has killed many Americans who otherwise might have expected to live for

 

Post-Pandemic, U.S. Healthcare is Entering a “Provide More Care For Less” Era – Pondering PwC’s 2022 Forecast

In the COVID-19 pandemic, health care spending in the U.S. increased by a relatively low 6.0% in 2020. This year, medical cost trend will rise by 7.0%, expected to decline a bit in 2022 according to the annual study from PwC Health Research Institute, Medical Cost Trend: Behind the Numbers 2022. What’s “behind these numbers” are factors that will increase medical spending (the “inflators” in PwC speak) and the “deflators” that lower costs. Looking around the future corner, the inflators are expected to be: A COVID-19 “hangover,” leading to increased health care services utilization Preparations for the next pandemic, and

 

Wearables Are Good For Older People, Too — The Latest From Laurie Orlov

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a whole lot of digital transformation for people staying home. For digital natives, that wasn’t such an exogenous shock. For older people who are digital immigrants, they will remember their initial Zoom get-together’s with much-missed family, ordering groceries online in the first ecommerce purchase, and using telemedicine for the first time as a digital health front-door. Laurie Orlov,  tech industry veteran, writer, speaker and elder care advocate, is the founder of the encyclopedic Aging and Health Technology Watch website. She takes this propitious moment to assess The Future of Wearables and Older Adult in a new report.

 

Spending on Medicines In and Post-COVID Say a Lot About Patients and Larger Healthcare Trends – an IQVIA Update

Spending on medicines, globally, will rebound this year and rise above pre-pandemic levels through 2025. Between 2021 and 2025, the annual growth global growth rate for prescription drugs spending is expected to range from 3% to 6%, a $1.6 trillion bill for the worlds’s total Rx medicines market. That relatively low single-digit growth rate is tempered by savings from biosimilars and the loss of brand exclusivity (that is, more generics coming to market). On the faster-growth side, we can expect two big therapeutic areas to drive spending upward: oncology and immunology, projected to expand by 9% to 12% each year

 

Health Disparities and the Risks of Social Determinants for COVID-19 – 14 Months of Evidence

In April 2020, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control issued a report featuring evidence that in the month of March 2020, the coronavirus pandemic was not an equal-opportunity killer. Within just a couple of months of COVID-19 emerging in America, it became clear that health disparities were evident in outcomes due to complications from the coronavirus. An update from that early look at differences in COVID-19 diagnoses and mortality rates was published in Health Disparities by Race and Ethnicity During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Current Evidence and Policy Approaches, In this report, the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, part of

 

The Post-COVID 19 Health Consumer: Ready for DIY Health Care and More Open to Telehealth

The COVID-19 pandemic has re-shaped consumers for work, school, fitness, cooking, and certainly for health care. PwC’s Health Research Institute has combed through their consumer survey data and developed insights on health consumers, shared in a summary titled Consumer health behavior and the COVID-19 pandemic: What we’ve learned. Most U.S. consumers would be likely to have a clinician visit their homes for several kinds of medical care, including: “DIY care,” as PwC exemplifies as a home strep or flu test, or remote monitoring, likely among 85% of people A chronic care visit, likely for 78% of consumers A visit for

 

The Cost of Healthcare Can Drive Medical Rationing and Crowd Out Other Household Spending

One in five people in the U.S. cannot afford to pay for quality health care — an especially acute challenge for Black and Hispanic Americans, according to a West Health-Gallup poll conducted in March 2021, a year into the COVID-19 pandemic. “The cost of healthcare and its potential ramifications continues to serve as a burdensome part of day-to-day life for millions of Americans,” the study summary observed. Furthermore, “These realities can spill over into other health issues, such as delays in diagnoses of new cancer and associated treatments that are due to forgoing needed care,” the researchers expected. The first table

 

How Fruits and Veg Can Make Health and Lower Costs – Calling Chef José Andrés to the White House

Springtime is finally emerging on the east coast of the U.S. and my local CSA farm is on my mind. It’s timely, then, to re-visit a research paper on subsidizing fruits and vegetables from a March 2019 issue of PLOS as an introduction to a new initiative growing out of The Center for Health Law and Policy Innovation of Harvard Law School (CHLPI) on produce prescriptions. Timely, too, that Chef José Andrés has been called to President Biden’s White House to help address food security in America. First, let’s look at the research in PLOS: Cost-effectiveness of financial incentives for

 

How to Restore Americans’ Confidence in U.S. Health Care: Deal With Access and Cost

With a vaccine supply proliferating in the U.S. and more health citizens getting their first jabs, there’s growing optimism in America looking to the next-normal by, perhaps, July 4th holiday weekend as President Biden reads the pandemic tea leaves. But that won’t mean Americans will be ready to return to pre-pandemic health care visits to hospital and doctor’s offices. Now that hygiene protocols are well-established in health care providers’ settings, at least two other major consumer barriers to seeking care must be addressed: cost and access. The latest (March 2021) Kaiser Family Foundation Tracking Poll learned that at least one

 

Ten Forces Shaping Health Care in 2021: A View from CVS Health

Expanding omni-channel, data-driven, cost-effective health care in the community, tailoring that care, and attending to mental health paint the picture of health through the lens of CVS Health. The company published the Health Trends Report 2021 today, calling out ten forces shaping health care this year. Those themes are, The Year of the Pharmacist The Next Step Forward in Cardiac Care Cancer Needs a Better Roadmap The EHR Hits Its Stride The Mental Health Shadow of COVID-19 Tailor Care to the Older Patient More Agents that Predict Disease Paying for the New Medical Miracle Virtual Care Goes Mainstream, and Diabetes

 

The Digital Transformation of Patients – Update from Rock Health and Stanford

The coronavirus pandemic accelerated digital transformation of organizations, including health care providers. But another patient side-effect of COVID-19 has been the digital transformation of many patients, documented by data gathered by Rock Health and Stanford Center for Digital Health and analyzed in their latest report explaining how the public health crisis accelerated digital health “beyond its years,” noted in the title of the report. Rock Health and Stanford commissioned an online survey among 7,980 U.S. adults from early September to early October 2020 to gauge peoples’ interest in and utilization of digital health tools and telehealth. Rock Health has conducted a consumer digital

 

The Social Determinants of Prescription Drugs – A View From CoverMyMeds

The COVID-19 pandemic forced consumers to define what were basic or essential needs to them; for most people, those items have been hygiene products, food, and connectivity to the Internet. There’s another good that’s essential to people who are patients: prescription drugs. A new report from CoverMyMeds details the current state of medication access weaving together key health care industry and consumer data. The reality even before the coronavirus crisis emerged in early 2020 was that U.S. patients were already making painful trade-offs, some of which are illustrated in the first chart from the report. These include self-rationing prescription drug

 

Three in Four People Avoiding Health Care in the Pandemic Have Had Chronic Conditions

By the autumn of 2020, U.S. physicians grew concerned that patients who were avoiding visits to doctor’s offices were missing care for chronic conditions, discussed in in Delayed and Forgone Health Care for Nonelderly Adults during the COVID-19 Pandemic from the Urban Institute. More than three-fourths of people who delayed or forewent care had at least one chronic health condition. The pandemic may have led to excess deaths from diabetes, dementia, hypertension, heart disease, and stroke, as well as record drug overdoses in the 12 months ending in May 2020. In their JAMA editorial on these data, Dr. Bauchner and

 

The Digital Transformation of Home for Health – Brainstorming with Karsten Russell-Wood of Philips

At the start of CES 2021, I had the opportunity to catch up with Karsten Russell-Wood, Portfolio Marketing Leader, Post Acute & Home, Connected Care at Philips. We brainstormed just as CES 2021 was going to “open,” virtually, for the consumer electronics conference’s first all-virtual meeting. Philips, a longtime major exhibitor at CES, created an entirely new online experience for the CES attendees – a sort of virtual gallery of different exhibits that are accessed from a single point in a “room” with various entry points. One of the company’s key messages for CES 2021 was health care delivered outside

 

Call It Deferring Services or Self-Rationing, U.S. Consumers Are Still Avoiding Medical Care

Patients in the U.S. have been self-rationing medical care for many years, well before any of us knew what “PPE” meant or how to spell “coronavirus.” Nearly a decade ago, I cited the Kaiser Family Foundation Health Security Watch of May 2012 here in Health Populi. The first chart here shows that one in four U.S. adults had problems paying medical bills, largely delaying care due to cost for a visit or for prescription drugs. Fast-forward to 2020, a few months into the pandemic in the U.S.: PwC found consumers were delaying treatment for chronic conditions. In October 2020, The American Cancer

 

How Grocery Stores Are Part of the Health/Care Ecosystem – the Case of ALDI and Instacart

As humans in the Age of the Coronavirus focus on physiological needs, people have intensely focused on hunting-and-gathering food and hygiene products. We will remember memes about toilet tissue stockpiling and re-visiting canned and shelf-stable comfort foods from childhood long after the pandemic. Some people, though, haven’t had easy access to nutritious food in their communities or the ability to engage with ecommerce platforms to order food for delivery. An alliance between ALDI, the value-priced grocer, and Instacart, was forged to address that gap as a key social determinant of health. Food-is-medicine when it comes to managing chronic conditions like

 

Two in Three Americans Cite the U.S. Presidential Election is a Significant Source of Stress, Even More than the 2016 Race

If you perceive you are more stressed in the COVID-19 pandemic than you were in 2019, you are one in many millions feeling so. If you felt stressed during the 2016 Presidential election season, you were also one in a million. Now, as the 2020 Election converges with the coronavirus crisis, even more Americans are feeling significant stress in a double-whammy impact. Our friends at the American Psychological Association have assessed Stress in America for many years of studies. The latest, published 7 October, finds that the 2020 Presidential election is a source of significant stress for more Americans than

 

The Coronavirus Pandemic Turbocharged Digital Health Investment in 2020

2020 will be remembered for disruption and dislocation on many fronts; among the major blips in the year will be it remembered as the largest funding year for digital health recorded, according to Rock Health’s report on the 3Q2020 digital health funding. This funding record (“already” before year-end, tallied by the third quarter as Rock Health notes) was driven by “mega”-deals accelerated during the public health crisis of COVID-19. In the third quarter of 2020, some $4 billion was invested in U.S. based digital health start-ups adding up $9.4 billion in 2020….so far. This is $1.2 billion more than two

 

Health Happens at Home: Lessons from the Parks Connected Health Summit

Home is where the health is, we know in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. To be sure, many of us who have been preaching that our ZIP codes are more impactful to our health than our genetic codes have known the evidence backing the social and behavioral determinants of health for a long time. This week, Parks Associates convened the Connected Health Summit, focused on the theme of consumer engagement and innovation. I attended all three days’ worth of sessions in this well-planned and -executed virtual meeting. In this post, I’ll weave my favorite themes of consumer health engagement

 

The Latest Health Technology Vision and Consumer Behavior Insights From Accenture

The COVID-19 pandemic hastened digital transformation for both the health care industry and for individuals — as health consumers, patients, caregivers, and health citizens. Two new reports from Accenture update our understanding of the changed health consumer in the context of both “home: and the health care ecosystem. These reports are Accenture’s annual Digital Health Technology Vision 2020, and an analysis of the firm’s Wave 7 of consumer research, answering the question, How will COVID-19 change the consumer? The 2020 tech vision for health is summarized here, tying to Accenture’s previous two years of forecasts. This year, the five pillars

 

Most Virtual Care Consumers, Satisfied With Visits in the COVID Era, Expect It for Future Care

Within days of the coronavirus pandemic emerging in the U.S., health care providers set up virtual care arrangements to convene with patients. Three months into the COVID-19 crisis, how have patients felt about these telehealth visits? In Patient Perspectives on Virtual Care, Kyruus answers this question based on an online survey of 1,000 patients 18 years of age and older, conducted in May 2020. Each of these health consumers had at least one virtual care visit between February and May 2020. The key findings were that: Engaging in a virtual visit was a new-new thing for 72% of people Patients’

 

Big Hearts, High Tech – How Caregiving Has Changed in the U.S.

We are all caregivers now. The COVID-19 pandemic has touched and continues to re-shape our daily lives. One reality that the coronavirus era has revealed is that caregiving is a daily life-flow for everyone around the world. In the U.S., this has particularly acute impacts — physical, emotional, and financial. The 2020 AARP report on caregiving was published this month, and the survey research into caregivers uncovered fresh insights about caregivers’ demographics, financial stressors, and intensity of tasks both in volume and time. In addition, more caregivers are looking for and turning to technology to help them hack effort, time

 

Health Care In the COVID-19 Era – PwC Finds Self-Rationing of Care and Meds Especially for Chronic Care

Patients in the U.S. are self-rationing care in the era of COVID-19 by cutting spending on health care visits and prescription drugs. The coronavirus pandemic’s impact on health consumers’ spending varies depending on whether the household is generally a healthy family unit, healthy “enthusiasts,” dealing with a simple or more complex chronic conditions, or managing mental health issues. PwC explored how COVID-19 is influencing consumers’ health care behaviors in survey research conducted in early April by the Health Research Institute. The findings were published in a May 2020 report, detailing study findings among 2,533 U.S. adults polled in early April

 

The Unsurprising Surprise of Social Determinants in COVID-19 Mortality

“Covid-19 exposes America’s racial health gap,” asserts The Economist, the weekly news magazine based in London, UK, in an advanced essay dated 11 April 2020. The subtitle of the piece: “African-Americans appear more vulnerable to the virus.” The phrase, “your ZIP code is more important than your genetic code” has become the common mantra for public health people communicating the concept of the social determinants of health: those factors outside of medical services that shape peoples’ overall health and well-being. Two days ago, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) published data that showed African-Americans were dying from complications of the

 

How the Coronavirus and Technology Are Reshaping Home-Work, -Life and -Health

As people conform to the #StayHome lifestyle to #FlattenTheCurve of the coronavirus pandemic, technology is transforming peoples’ home lives for working, playing, and socializing. The Consumer Technology Association has conducted the COVID-19 Impact Study assessing the use of technology at home, exploring U.S. households’ changing behaviors for consuming content, stocking the pantry, engaging with social media, and using online health and fitness tools. This research surveyed 1,004 U.S. adults 18 and over in March 2020 — early in the U.S. pandemic’s national “curve.” U.S. consumers’ top five technology purchases in mid-March 2020 were for smartphones, laptop computers, TVs, and headphones/earbuds.

 

Telehealth and COVID-19 in the U.S.: A Conversation with Ann Mond Johnson, ATA CEO

Will the coronavirus inspire greater adoption of telehealth in the U.S.? Let’s travel to Shanghai, China where, “the covid-19 epidemic has brought millions of new patients online. They are likely to stay there,” asserts “The smartphone will see you now,” an article in the March 7th 2020 issue of The Economist. The article returns to the advent of the SARS epidemic in China in 2003, which ushered in a series of events: people stayed home, and Chinese social media and e-commerce proliferated. The coronavirus spawned another kind of gift to China and the nation’s health citizens: telemedicine, the essay explains. A

 

Most Workers and their Employers Want to Receive Digital Healthcare On-Demand

Most employers and their workers see the benefits of digital health in helping make health care more accessible and lower-cost, according to survey research published in Health on Demand from Mercer Marsh Benefits. Interestingly, more workers living in developing countries are keener on going digital for health than people working in wealthier nations. Mercer’s study was global, analyzing companies and their employees in both mature and growth economies around the world. In total, Mercer interviewed 16,564 workers and 1,300 senior decision makers in companies. The U.S. sample size was 2,051 employees and 100 decision makers. There’s a treasure trove of insights

 

Consumers Seek Benefits From Food, a Personal Social Determinant of Health

As consumers in the U.S. wrestle with accessing and paying for medical benefits, there’s another sort of health benefit people increasingly understand, embrace, and consume: food-as-medicine. More people are taking on the role of health consumers as they spend more out-of-pocket on medical care and insurance, and seeking food to bolster their health is part of this behavior change. One in four Americans seek health benefits from food, those who don’t still seek the opportunity to use food for weight loss goals, heart health and energy boosting, according to the 2019 Food & Health Survey from the International Food Information

 

Home Is Where the Health Is, CareMore Health (And Most People) Believe

Most people dealing with chronic conditions, and those who care for them, believe that “home is where the health is,” according to a survey about the “21st century house call” from CareMore Health. To gain peoples’ perspectives on health care at home and chronic disease management, CareMore Health and Aspire Health commissioned a survey among 2,009 U.S. adults 23 years of age and over in September and October 2019. The survey sample included people dealing with chronic disease themselves, as well as caregivers attending to people with chronic illnesses. The definition of that “modern house call” is largely based on the

 

The Heart of Health at CES 2020 – Evidence & Innovation Bridge Consumers and Doctors

The digital health presence at CES 2020 is the fastest-growing segment of consumer technologies at the Show this year, increasing by 25% over 2019. Heart-focused technologies are a big part of that growth story. In fact, in our search for devices and tools underpinned with clinical proof, evidence is growing for consumer-facing technology for heart-health, demonstrated by this year’s CES. Wrist-worn devices, digital therapeutics, patient engagement platforms, pharma and health plans converged at this year’s CES, with the professional association “blessing” of the American College of Cardiology who granted a continuing medical education credit for physicians attending a one-day “disruptive

 

Out-of-Pocket and Prescription Drug Costs – Connecting Digital Health Dots at CES 2020

The top two health care concerns facing Americans are out-of-pocket costs and prescriptions drug costs, according to a poll published today in Morning Consult. Apropos to my title of this post, the survey was sponsored by the Bipartisan Policy Center, whose mission is to promote, cross-party affiliations, “health, security and opportunity for all Americans.” Health care is the top issue driving voters’ choices in the 2020 elections for most Americans. The economy follows second with 44% of voters, then immigration with 33% of Americans keen on the issue. For overall healthcare reform, the plurality of Americans prefer improving the current system

 

What HealthyThinker Is Thinking About Health at CES 2020

Next week, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) will convene CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, where over 180,000 tech-minded people from around the world will convene to kick the tires on new TVs, games, smart home devices, 5G connections, 3-D printing, drones, and to be sure, digital health innovations. At #CES2020, exhibitors in the health/care ecosystem will go well beyond wearable devices for tracking steps and heart rate. I’ll be meeting with wearable tech innovators along with consumer electronics companies and retailers. I’ve also scheduled get-togethers with pharma and life science folks, health plan people, and execs from consumer health companies.

 

The 2020 Social Determinants of Health: Connectivity, Art, Air and Love

Across the U.S., the health/care ecosystem warmly embraced social determinants of health as a concept in 2019. A few of the mainstreaming-of-SDoH signposts in 2019 were: Cigna studying and focusing in on loneliness as a health and wellness risk factor Humana’s Bold Goal initiative targeting Medicare Advantage enrollees CVS building out an SDOH platform, collaborating with Unite US for the effort UPMC launching a social impact program focusing on SDoH, among other projects investing in social factors that bolster public health. As I pointed out in my 2020 Health Populi trendcast, the private sector is taking on more public health

 

Medicare Members Are Health Consumers, Too – Our AHIP Talk About Aging, Digital Immigrants, and Personalizing Health/Care

As Boomers age, they’re adopting mobile and smart technology platforms that enable people to communicate with loved ones, manage retirement investment portfolios, ask Alexa to play Frank Sinatra’s greatest hits, and manage prescription refills from the local grocery store pharmacy. Last week, the Giant Eagle grocery chain was the first pharmacy retailer to offer a new medication management skill via Alexa. That program has the potential to change our Medicare members manage meds at home to ensure better adherence, supporting better health outcomes and personal feelings of efficacy and control. [As an aside, consumers really value pharmacies embedded in grocery

 

Despite Greater Digital Health Engagement, Americans Have Worse Health and Financial Outcomes Than Other Nations’ Health Citizens

The idea of health care consumerism isn’t just an American discussion, Deloitte points out in its 2019 global survey of healthcare consumers report, A consumer-centered future of health. The driving forces shaping health and health care around the world are re-shaping health care financing and delivery around the world, and especially considering the growing role of patients in self-care — in terms of financing, clinical decision making and care-flows. With that said, Americans tend to be more healthcare-engaged than peer patients in Australia, Canada, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Singapore, and the United Kingdom, Deloitte’s poll found. Some of the key behaviors

 

Longevity Stalls Around the World And Wealth, More Concentrated

Two separate and new OECD reports, updating health and the global economic outlook, raise two issues that are inter-related: that gains in longevity are stalling, with chronic illnesses and mental ill health affecting more people; and, as wealth grows more concentrated among the wealthy, the economic outlook around most of the world is also slowing. First, we’ll mine the Health at a Glance 2019 annual report covering data on population health, health system performance, and medical spending across OECD countries. The first chart arrays the x-y data points of life expectancy versus health spending for each of the OECD countries

 

Art As Medicine – WHO Weaves the Evidence for Arts’ Role in Improving Health

“What’s the evidence on the role of the arts in improving health and well-being?” asks a report from the World Health Organization‘s Europe region team (WHO-Europe). There’s a lot of proof supporting arts-as-medicine, WHO details in this paper, which synthesizes research published in over 3,000 studies. The first chart illustrates the logic model that bridges arts to health in three segments: “Components” of arts programs, including but not limited to cognitive stimulation (e.g., learning a new arts skill such as painting, drawing or journaling), social interaction (e.g., participating in theatre), physical activity (e.g., dance), and evocation of emotion (e.g., listening

 

A Tale of Two Americas as Told by the 2019 OECD Report on Health

It was the best of times, It was the worst of times, It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, It was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, … starts Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities.  That’s what came to my mind when reading the latest global health report from the OECD, Health at a Glance 2019, which compares the United States to other nations’ health care outcomes, risk factors, access metrics, and spending. Some trends are consistent across the wealthiest countries of the world, many sobering, such as: Life expectancy rates fell in 19 of the

 

The Link Between Wellness & Wealth Is Powerful for Everyone – and Especially Women

In the U.S., the link between wellness and wealth, money and health, is strong and common across people, young and old. But the impacts of money on health, well-being, and life choices varies across the ages, based on a study from Lively, a company that builds platforms for health savings accounts. The first chart illustrates that health care costs challenge people in many ways: the most obvious health care cost problems prevent people from saving more for retirement or paying down debt. Eight in 10 Americans concur that rising health care costs challenge their ability to save for retirement. Beyond the

 

Making Health Care Better, from the N of 1 to the Public’s Health – Trend-Weaving Medecision Liberation 2019

Health and our health information are deeply personal. Changing health care and inspiring positive health behaviors is hard to do. But we must and we will, a group of inspiring and inspired people who work across the health/care ecosystem affirmed this week in Dallas at the conference of Medecision Liberation 2019. I was engaged at this conference to wear several hats — as a keynote speaker, a sort of “emcee,” and, finally, to trend-weave the many talks and discussions happening throughout the meeting. This post is my synthesis of the summary I delivered live at the end of the conference,

 

The New Employer Wellness Lens Includes Mental Health, Telehealth and Women’s Health

U.S. employers are tightening their focus on mental and behavioral health, addressing workers’ chronic conditions, emphasizing women’s health, and allocating more resources to digital and telehealth investments, we learn from Optum’s Ten Years of Health and Well-Being at Work: Learning from our past and reimagining the future. Four in five medium, large and jumbo companies expect their spending on health and wellness programs will increase over the next three years. That spending will have a strong focus on behavioral health services: 9 in 10 employers are concerned with the level of access workers have to mental health services. Companies will

 

Finances Are the Top Cause of Stress, and HSAs Aren’t Helping So Much…Yet

If you heed the mass media headlines and President Trump’s tweets, the U.S. has achieved “the best economy” ever in mid-July 2019. But if you’re working full time in that economy, you tend to feel much less positive about your personal prospects and fiscal fitness. Nearly nine in 10 working Americans believe that medical costs will rise in the next few years as they pondering potential changes to the Affordable Care Act. The bottom line is that one-half of working people are more concerned about how they will save for future health care expenses. That’s the over-arching theme in PwC’s

 

Health Care and Consumers in 2030: A Profile from KPMG

A “one layered delivery network through which patients can move seamlessly as they age and their needs evolve” will be the new health care platform to meet patients’ demands by 2030, according to a forecast from KPMG’s Healthcare and Life Sciences Institute. In Healthcare 2030: The consumer at the center, the KPMG team explores the demographic shifts and market drivers that will challenge the health care industry in the current U.S. delivery and financing system. The lens on that 2030 future is a consumer-centric delivery model that KPMG believes will be a solution to dealing with a demographic divide between

 

Health Care and the Democratic Debates – Round 2 – Battle Royale for M4All vs Medicare for All Who Want It – What It Means for Industry

Looking at this photo of the 2020 Democratic Party Presidential candidate debater line-up might give you a déjà vu feeling, a repeat of the night-before debate. But this was Round 2 of the debate, with ten more White House aspirants sharing views — sometimes sparring — on issues of immigration, economic justice, climate change, and once again health care playing a starring role from the start of the two-hour event. The line-up from left to write included: Marianne Williamson. author and spiritual advisor John Hickenlooper, former Governor of Colorado Andrew Yang. tech company executive Pete Buttigieg, Mayor of South Bend,

 

The Grocery Store As Health Destination: Publix Produce for Kids and the Social Determinants of Health

Food insecurity ranks high on Americans’ greatest social health risks. In local communities, grocery stores are playing key roles in bolstering neighborhood wellness. Publix and other food chains, collaborating with the Produce for Kids program, are walking the talk on nutrition for local health citizens. Produce for Kids is associated with Feeding America, which works with local food banks and non-profits to help channel healthy food to children and families. Feeding America is a national network of over 200 food banks fighting hunger in America, serving over 46 million people and 60,000 food pantries, and advocating for legislation that addresses

 

People Want to Flourish, Not Just Live – Speaking Health Politics to Real People

“How should we define ‘health?'” a 2011 BMJ article asked. The context for the question was that the 1948 World Health Organization definition of health — that health is, “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”– was not so useful in the 21st century. The authors, a global, multidisciplinary team from Europe, Canada and the U.S., asserted that by 2011, human health was marked less by infectious disease and more by non-communicable conditions that could be highly influenced, reversed and prevented through self-care by the individual and public health policy

 

Patients’ Expectations for Health Beyond Care: Think Food, Exercise, Emotions, Sleep and Finance

People want to make health with their health care providers, and they want more than care from them: most patients are looking for support with healthy eating, exercise, emotional support, sleep, stress management, social relationships, and financial health. And in case physicians, nurses and pharmacists aren’t sufficiently business with that punch-list for health, two in three U.S. patients would also like to receive help in finding a higher purpose. This is the health consumer’s mass call-out for holistic health, Welltok discovered in a survey conducted among over 1,600 U.S. adults in March 2019. The results are detailed in the assertively 

 

Scaling the Social Determinants of Health – McKinsey and Kaiser’s Bold Move

People who are in poor health or use more health care services are more likely to report multiple unmet social needs, such as food insecurity, unsafe neighborhoods, lack of good housing, social isolation, and poor transportation access, found through a survey conducted by McKinsey. The results are summarized in Addressing the Social Determinants of Health. The growing recognition of the influence of social determinants reached a tipping point last week with the news that Kaiser-Permanente would work with Unite US to scale services to people who need them. The mainstreaming of SDoH speaks to the awareness that health is made

 

Prescription Drug Costs In America Through the Patient Lens, via IQVIA, GoodRx and a New $2 Million Therapy

Americans consumed 17.6 prescriptions per person in 2018, two in three of which treated chronic conditions. Welcome to Medicine Use and Spending in the U.S. , the annual review of prescription drug supply, demand and Rx pricing dynamics from the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science. In a call with analysts this week in which I participated, the Institute’s Executive Director Murray Aitken discussed the report which looks back at 2018 and forward to 2023 with scenarios about what the U.S. prescription drug market might look like five years from now. The report is organized into four sections: medical use

 

Across All Political Parties, Likely Voters Over 50 Favor Cutting Prescription Drug Prices

People over 50 in the U.S. that are likely to vote in the 2020 Presidential election are keenly interested in lowering the cost of prescription drugs, according to a survey conducted by AARP in February and March 2019. Most people over 50 take prescription drugs daily; one-third take two or three Rx’s regularly, and one in five older people take six or more prescription medicines regularly. Thus, prescription drugs are part of most older Americans’ daily life-flows and household spending considerations. About two-thirds of older people who are likely to vote say that Rx prices are “unreasonable,” including 67% of

 

The United States of Diabetes: a $1,240 Tax on Every American

Pharmaceutical company executives are testifying in the U.S. Congress this week on the topic of prescription drug costs. One of those medicines, insulin, cost a patient $5,705 for a year’s supply in 2016, double what it cost in 2012, according to the Health Care Cost Institute. Know that one of these insulin products, Lilly’s Humalog,  came onto the market in 1996. In typical markets, as products mature and get mass adoption, prices fall. Not so insulin, one of the many cost components in caring for diabetes. But then prescription drug pricing doesn’t conform with how typical markets work in theory.

 

World Health Day 2019: Let’s Celebrate Food, Climate, Insurance Coverage and Connectivity

Today, 7 April, is World Health Day. With that in mind, I devote this post to three key social determinants of health (SDOH) that are top-of-mind for me these days: food for health, climate change, and universal health coverage. UHC happens to be WHO’s focus for World Health Day 2019. [As a bonus, I’ll add in a fourth SDOH in the Hot Points for good measure and health-making]. Why a World Health Day? you may be asking. WHO says it’s, “a chance to celebrate health and remind world leaders that everyone should be able to access the health care they need,

 

Loneliness Is A Health Risk, Especially Among Older People

In America, one in three people over 50 years of age feels a lack of companionship, and one-fourth feel isolated from other people, according to a new poll on loneliness and aging from the University of Michigan, sponsored by AARP. The University of Michigan National Poll on Healthy Aging surveyed some 2,000 U.S. adults age 50–80 in October 2018, assessing older peoples’ health, health behaviors, experiences and feelings related to companionship and social isolation. While three in four people have frequent social contact with family, friends and neighbors outside of their home, the remaining one in four have social contact once a

 

The Cost of Prescription Drugs, Doctors and Patient Access – A View from HIMSS19

Most patient visits to doctors result in a prescription written for a medicine that people retrieve from a pharmacy, whether retail in the local community or via mail order for a maintenance drug. This one transaction generates a lot of data points, which individually have a lot of importance for the individual patient. Mashed with other patients’, prescription drug utilization data can combine with more data to be used for population health, cost-effectiveness, and other constructive research pursuits. At HIMSS19, there’s an entire day devoted to a Pharma Forum on Tuesday 12 February, focusing on pharma-provider-payor collaborations. Allocating a full

 

The Caveats for Health/Care at CES 2019

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a “caveat” is, “a warning to consider something before doing anything more.” It is fitting that CES is held in Las Vegas, land of high risk and, with a lot of luck, reward. With that theme in mind, I depart LAS airport tonight on an aptly-named red-eye flight back home after spending an entire week here. I’m pondering not what I saw — some of which I covered daily over the past week — but what I didn’t see. Consider these the caveats for health/care at #CES2019. In no particular order… Where was the Chairman of

 

Heart Health at #CES2019 – Food and Tech as Medicine

Self-care is the new health care as patients, now consumers at greater financial risk for medical spending, are learning. At #CES2019, I’m on the lookout for digital technologies that can help people adopt and sustain healthy behaviors that can help consumers save money on medical care and enhance quality of life-years. This week’s heart-and-food tech announcements at #CES2019 coincide with an FDA recall on a popular drug prescribed to treat hypertension (high blood pressure). Using food and tech as medicine can help people avoid going on medications like statins and others for heart health. An important example of this self-care

 

The Ultimate Health Outcome, Mortality, Is Rising in America

How long can people living in the U.S. expect to live? 78.6 years of age, if you were born in 2017. That’s a decline of 0.1 year from 2016. This decline especially impacted baby boys: their life expectancy fell to 76.1 years, while baby girls’ life expectancy stayed even at 81.1 years. That’s the latest data on Mortality in the United States, 2017, soberly brought to you by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Underneath these stark numbers are the specific causes of death: in 2017, more Americans died

 

Consumers Want Help With Health: Can Healthcare Providers Supply That Demand?

Among people who have health insurance, managing the costs of their medical care doesn’t rank as a top frustration. Instead, attending to health and wellbeing, staying true to an exercise regime, maintaining good nutrition, and managing stress top U.S. consumers’ frustrations — above managing the costs of care not covered by insurance. And maintaining good mental health and staying on-track with health goals come close to managing uncovered costs, Oliver Wyman’s 2018 consumer survey learned. These and other important health consumer insights are revealed in the firm’s latest report, Waiting for Consumers – The Oliver Wyman 2018 Consumer Survey of US

 

How Food and Data Can Support Consumers and Healthy Living: Listening at Groceryshop

Eat food, not too much, mostly plants, Michael Pollan advised us on the cover of his breakthrough book on nutrition in America, In Defense of Food.  In Las Vegas, it’s not too easy to live and eat  according to Pollan’s Food Rules. We’re at a fork in the road when it comes to food, retail grocery shopping, and health, which is an intersection I’m increasingly working in these days. The Groceryshop conference is further informing my understanding of the landscape of the technology that’s enabling the consumer’s ability to curate, purchase, and receive the food they want to satisfy hunger and

 

Financial Stress Is An Epidemic In America, Everyday Health Finds

One in three working-age people in the U.S. have seen a doctor about something stress-related. Stress is a way of American life, based on the findings in The United States of Stress, a survey from Everyday Health. Everyday Health polled 6,700 U.S. adults between 18 and 64 years of age about their perspectives on stress, anxiety, panic, and mental and behavioral health. Among all sources of stress, personal finances rank as the top stressor in the U.S. Over one-half of consumers say financial issues regularly stress them out. Finances, followed by jobs and work issues, worries about the future, and relationships cause

 

CVS + Aetna: Inflection Point in US Healthcare, Merger Approved Update

    CVS Health’s acquisition of Aetna was approved this week by U.S. Federal regulators after months of scrutinizing the antitrust-size-market control implications of the deal. I wrote this post on the deal as an inflection point in American healthcare on 3rd December 2017 when CVS and Aetna announced their marriage intentions. This post updates my initial thoughts on the deal, given the morphing US healthcare market on both the traditional health services front and fast-evolving retail health environment. The nation’s largest retail pharmacy chain signed a deal to combine with one of the top three health insurance companies. The deal

 

Slow Food, Slow Medicine: What Italy Can Teach America About Health

Obesity, diabesity, food deserts and food swamps co-exist across America, factors that cost the U.S. economy over $327 billion a year just in the costs of diagnosed diabetes. In addition, America’s overweight and obesity epidemic results in lost worker productivity, mental health and sleep challenges, and lower quality of life for millions of Americans. Food — healthy, accessible, fairly-priced — is a key social determinant of individual health, wellness, and a public’s ability to pursue happiness. There’s a lot the U.S. can learn from the food culture, policy and economy of Italy when it comes to health. This week, I have the

 

Sicker Consumers Are More Willing to Share Health Data

People dealing with chronic conditions are keener to share personally-generated data than people that don’t have a chronic disease, Deloitte’s 2018 Survey of U.S> Health Care Consumers learned. This and other insights about the patient journey are published in Inside the patient journey, a report from Deloitte that assesses three key touch points for consumer health engagement. These three patient journey milestones are searching for care, using new channels of care, and tracking and sharing health data, Deloitte maps. What drives people to engage on their patient journeys has a lot  more to do with practical matters of care like convenience,

 

The Health Consumer Seeks Fresh, Free-From and…Turmeric

The impact of health and wellness is on most consumers’ minds, Nielsen’s consumer research has found. Sarah Schmansky, Nielsen’s strategy leader for health, wellness and “fresh,” moderated a panel at the GMDC Health-Beauty-Wellness Conference in Orlando today that brainstormed how consumers are shopping for health. Underneath that “how” is more than the next-best-me-too-product for allergy or acne. It’s about efficacy of the product at the core, but bundled with social responsibility and sustainability, informative packaging, transparency of ingredients, and education that empowers the individual. “Self-care is the driver of growth,” Sarah began the discussion. But these needs under the self-care umbrella

 

Self-Care is Healthcare for Everyday People

Patients are the new healthcare payors, and as such, taking on the role of health consumers. In fact, health and wellness consumers have existed since a person purchased the first toothpaste, aspirin, heating pad, and moisturizing cream at retail. Or consulted with their neighborhood herbalista, homeopathic practitioner, therapeutic masseuse, or skin aesthetician. Today, the health and wellness consumer can DIY all of these things at home through a huge array of products available in pharmacies, supermarkets, Big Box stores, cosmetic superstores, convenience and dollar stores, and other retail channels – increasingly, online (THINK, of course, of Amazon — more on

 

Going Digital for Health Is a New-Normal for Consumers

Using digital health tech is a new normal for U.S. consumers, including Seniors, found in the 2018 digital health consumer survey from Deloitte. The title of the report, “Consumers are on board with virtual health options,” summarizes the bullish outlook for telehealth. That’s the consumer-demand side of the equation. But the tagline begs the supply side question: “Can the health care system deliver?” For a decade or longer, we’ve noted the slow uptake of telehealth and digital health tools among healthcare providers. But the consumer pressures, along with evidence-based self-service options for health – both for “care” and for wellness,

 

The Top Pain Point in the Healthcare Consumer Experience is Money

Beyond the physical and emotional pain that people experience when they become a patient, in the U.S. that person becomes a consumer bearing expenses and financial pain, as well. 98% of Americans rank paying their medical bills is an important pain point in their patient journey, according to Embracing consumerism: Driving customer engagement in the healthcare financial journey, from Experian Health. Experian is best known as the consumer credit reporting agency; Experian Health works with healthcare providers on revenue cycle management, patient identity, and care management, so the company has experience with patient finance and medical expense sticker shock. In the

 

Multimorbidity In the US – Obesity As A Key Driver of Health Spending

In the U.S., the growing prevalence of multi-morbidity is contributing to increased mortality and healthcare cost growth in America. Underlying this clinical and economic phenomenon is obesity, which primary care doctors are challenged to deal with as a chronic condition along with typically co-occurring comorbidities of hypertension, diabetes, and hyperlipidemia. The line chart come from a new study into Multimorbidity Trends in United States Adults, 1988-2014, published in the July-August 2018 issue of the Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine. The authors, affiliated with the West Virginia University Department of Family Medicine, call out that obesity (the pink-red line)

 

“Lower Prescription Drug Prices” – A Tri-Partisan Call Across America

  There’s growing evidence that a majority of U.S. voters, across the three-party landscape, agree on two healthcare issues this year: coverage of pre-existing conditions, and lowering the consumer-facing costs of prescription drugs. A new poll jointly conducted by Politico and the Harvard Chan School of Public Health bolsters my read on the latter issue – prescription drug pricing, which has become a mass popular culture union. There may be no other issue on voters’ collective minds for the 2018 mid-term election that so unites American voters than the demand for lower-cost medicines. This is directly relates to consumers’ tri-party

 

FANGs & MAGA – Meet WaWa for Health, Walgreens and Walmart

While Amazon and Google get lots of positive PR and media attention as major healthcare industry disruptors, don’t forget about two big “W’s,” Walgreens and Walmart, in the healthcare innovator mix. I recently read The Four in which Scott Galloway explains the dominance of Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook in consumers’ everyday lives. These four tech-behemoths each have their particular designs on healthcare innovation, or disruption in the eyes of, say, Epic and Cerner working on health IT systems, or GE and IBM if you’ve been pioneers in health data or big-iron information technology. Then in the past week, the

 

Value Comes to Healthcare: But Whose Value Is It?

The Search for Value is the prevailing journey to a Holy Grail in healthcare these days. On that, most stakeholders working on the ground, globally. can agree. But whose value is it, anyway? Three reports published in the past few weeks give us some useful perspective on that question, woven together in today’s Health Populi blog. Let’s start with the Philips Future Health Index, which assesses value to 16 national health systems through three lenses: access, satisfaction, and efficiency. The results are shown in the map. “Value-based healthcare is contextual, geared towards providing the right care in the right place, at