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Consumers’ Spending on Tech in 2024 Will Increase: CTA’s #CES2024 Forecast

2023 was a pretty lackluster year for consumers’ spending on technology: inflation, concerns  about global instability, and general household economic ennui caused consumers to ration spending on most electronic gadgets last year. Enter a more cash-positive mood for many consumers keener in the new year to acquire updated and upgraded tech, from computer hardware to wearable tech for health, according to the forecast released by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) research team. The study results, announced on the first of two pre-conference Media Days, kicks off CES 2024 convening this week in Las Vegas. The bullish spending statistics reverse a two-year

 

“My Doctor’s Office” Should Accept Wearable Tech Health Data, Most Patients Say

“Do personal health trackers belong in the doctor’s office?” Software Advice wondered. “Yes,” the company’s latest consumer survey found, details of which are discussed in a report published on their website. Unique to this study is the patient sample polled: Software Advice surveyed 876 patients in September 2023 to gauge their perspectives on wearable tech and health. Note that the patient sample was limited to consumers who had seen a health care provider in the past two years and who also owned and used a personal wearable health device such as an Apple Watch or Fitbit. Thus, the responses shared

 

Consumers’ Growing Use of Portals and Apps: People Embracing Their Patient Journeys

The latest read from ONC, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, tells a story about patients’ growing use of online portals, medical records, and smartphone apps to access personal health information. We now have solid evidence empowering us to disagree with Col, Nathan Jessup, the iconic character played by Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, who responded to Tom Cruise’s Lt. Kaffee’s demand for “the truth” as the villainous Colonel raged, “You can’t handle the truth.” But ONC data belies that: as it happens, patients can handle the truth, as we learn that 9 in 10

 

Health Care Finance Leaders Look to Cut Costs and Improve Patients’ Financial Experience — Think AI and Venmo

One half-of health care financial leaders plan to invest in technology to cut costs — and most believe that AI has the potential to re-define the entire finance function as they look to Leading the transformation, a study conducted by U.S. Bank among U.S. health finance leaders thinking about emerging technologies.               U.S. Bank fielded a survey among 200 senior health care financial leaders in the U.S., 30% of whom were group CFOs, 20% regional/divisional CFOs, 25% senior managers, and the remaining various flavors of financial managers. All respondents were responsible for at least $100

 

AI is the New Health Literacy Challenge for Patients and the Health/Care Industry

Patients’ comfort in artificial intelligence is linked to familiarity with the technology, a consumer survey from GlobalData learned. Among patients unfamiliar with AI, 42% are uncomfortable, and another 50% feel neither comfortable nor uncomfortable with the technology. However, among patients familiar with AI, 60% feel comfortable with visiting a medical practice that uses AI. Welcome to the new health literacy challenge the health care sector will have to deal with, and soon: lack of patients’ awareness of AI, its promises and pitfalls.             “It is imperative to prioritize patient education regarding this technology,” Urte Jakimaviciute

 

From Managing Healthcare Providers’ Costs to “Revolutionizing” Care – Bain Looks at the Short- and Long-Term for Generative AI

“Generative AI already has the power to alleviate some of providers’ biggest woes, which include rising costs and high inflation, clinician shortages, and physician burnout,” Bain & Company observe in Beyond Hype: Getting the Most Out of Generative AI in Healthcare Today. By the end of this paper, the Bain team expects that those health care leaders who are investing in generative AI today (to start small, to win big in the report’s words) will learn key lessons that will put them “on a path to eventually revolutionize their businesses.” Bain & Company surveyed U.S. health system leaders to gauge their

 

Consumers’ Use of Digital Health is Just Part of Mainstream Life Now

Using the Internet and mobile health apps are as mainstream as swiping left for a date and researching features in a new car, based on the Digital 2023 Global Overview Report from Meltwater. The broad coverage of this kind of research can’t be accomplished by just one entity, and Meltwater acknowledges the partners who brought them to this research-party: these included data.ai, GSMA Intelligence, GWI, Locowise, Ookla, PPRO, SemRush, Similarweb, Skai, and Statista. In this 400+ page report, you can find most datapoints you’re interested in covering the global consumers’ use of the internet, mobile apps, and social media. I

 

Patients Have AI-Disconnect When it Comes to Their Health Care – Pew Research Center Insights

Most U.S. health citizens think AI is being adopted in American health care too quickly, feeling “significant discomfort…with the idea of AI being used in their own health care,” according to consumer studies from the Pew Research Center.                  The top-line is that 60% of Americans would be uncomfortable with [their health] provider relying on AI in their own care, found in a consumer poll fielded in December 2022 among over11,000 U.S. adults. Most consumers who are aware of common uses of AI know about wearable fitness trackers that can analyze exercise and sleep

 

The Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns for 2023 Are About Social, Mental and Behavioral Health

Ten years ago, ECRI named the top 10 health technology hazards  for 2013: they were alarm hazards, medication administrative errors using infusion pumps, unnecessary exposure and radiation burns from diagnostic radiology procedures, patient/data mismatches in EHRs and other HIT systems, interoperability failures with medical devices and health IT systems, and five other tech-related hazards. In 2014, ECRI pivoted the title of this annual report to “patient safety concerns,” a nuance away from health technology. Fast forward to 2023 and ECRI’s latest take on the Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns 2023. While technology is embedded in this list, the headlines have more

 

How Will Consumers’ Declining Trust in Technology Impact Health Tech?

Americans’ trust in technology as “plummeted” in the past decade, according to the 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer’s focused look on trust and technology. How might this play into U.S. health citizens’ trust in digital health technology?             To answer that, let’s start with the macro-view on trust in tech. Richard Edelman convened a virtual meeting launch for the Trust Barometer’s tech perspectives yesterday, looking broadly at the global study findings. For these trust-tech insights, Edelman surveyed 15,000 citizens between August 31 and September 12, 2022, residing in 12 countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany,

 

Physicians More Bullish On the Benefits of Digital Tools for Patient Care, the AMA Tells Us

Most doctors see the advantages of digital health tools like telehealth, consumers’ access to their health information, and point-of-care workflow solutions, the American Medical Association found in a survey of 1300 physicians, published in September 2022.             The AMA first conducted research with physicians and their views on digital health in July 2016. This year’s study was designed to compare current clinicians’ perspectives with those garnered in the 2016 and 2019 studies. There is a clear and positive shift of doctors’ adoption of and appreciation for digital tools, with “growth in enthusiasm” concentrated in tele-visits, the

 

Hacking Health Care, Your Top Health-Tech Summer Read

“Tom Lawry reminds us that the health care industry can shift from glacial to warp speed when it needs to. Given the right tools, we can evolve from health systems to systems of health, baked with Responsible Intelligence to do good while embedded with respect, inclusion, and transparency. Health citizens deserve Tom’s vision to emerge,” I wrote in a quote on the back of Tom’s new book, Hacking Health Care: How AI and the Intelligence Revolution Will Reboot an Ailing System.                 Tom knows whereof he speaks and writes and opines: he has

 

The Retail Health Battle Royale in the U.S. – A Week-Long Brainstorm, Day 2 of 5 – Amazon and One Medical

Today we review the various viewpoints on Amazon’s announced acquisition of One Medical (ONEM, aka 1life Healthcare) which has been a huge story in both health care trade publications, business news, and mainstream media outlets. Welcome to Day 2 of The Retail Health Battle Royale in the U.S., my week-long update of the American retail health/care ecosystem weaving the latest updates from the market and implications and import for health care consumers.       The deal was announced on 21 July, with Amazon striking the price at about $3.9 billion. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley put the deal together,

 

What Person-Centered Interoperability Looks Like: Seqster

He had me at the statement, “I believe health data is medicine.” Those were the words of Ardy Arianpour, CEO and Co-Founder of Seqster, when sharing with me how his company was founded. We met up last week at the DIA Europe 2022 meeting (Drug Information Association) in the cool SQUARE Conference Center in Brussels, Belgium (my current home base for work and life). It was a rare opportunity to sit still with this on-the-go guy with whom an hour spent is the equivalent of three hours with most other folks. Ardy and the team call Seqster “the operating system

 

Techquity: How Technology Can Help to Scale Health and Digital Equity, Live from VIVE 2022

The COVID-19 pandemic revealed long-systemic health disparities in the U.S. and in other parts of the world. Income inequality, sickly environments in homes and communities (think unclean air and water), lack of public transportation and nutritious food deserts combine to limit peoples’ health and well-being., Beyond the traditional social determinants of health, such as these, we’ve called out another health risk that became crucial for life in the coronavirus pandemic era: digital connectivity, Indeed, WiFi and broadband represent the newest social determinant of health to add to a growing list of risk factors that challenge health citizens’ health. Kudos to

 

The Reluctance of Consumers to Share Personal Information – The Challenge of Data for Health “Blurring”

Health is the cornerstone to our core needs, thereby the cornerstone to trust.” This was one lens on the latest 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer published earlier this month. But trust is in short supply when it comes to consumers openness to share their personal information we learn through a new study published in JAMA, Consumer Willingness to Share Personal Digital Information for Health-Related Uses. For some historical context, the authors (all affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania [medical school or Wharton (business school)] start with HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act which served up privacy protections based on

 

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

 

Why #CES2022 Will Be Keynoted By A Health Care Innovator for the First Time

In October 2021, the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) announced that Robert Ford, CEO and President of Abbott, would give a keynote speech at CES 2022, the world’s largest annual convention of the technology industry. “This marks the first time in CES history that a healthcare company will take the mainstage for a keynote at the show,” CTA’s press release stated. I covered this announcement in the Health Populi blog at the time, and today want to double-down on the significance of Ford’s leading presence at #CES2022. When announced, the news was a signal that health care and the larger tech-enabled

 

Designing Digital Health for Public Health Preparedness and Equity: the Consumer Tech Association Doubles Down

A coalition of health care providers, health plans, technology innovators, NGOs, and medical societies has come together as the Public Health Tech Initiative (PHTI), endorsed by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) with the goal of advancing the use of trustworthy digital health to proactively meet the challenge of future public health emergencies….like pandemics. At the same time, CTA has published a paper on Advancing Health Equity Through Technology which complements and reinforces the PHTI announcement and objective. The paper that details the PHTI program, Using Heath Technology to Response to Public Health Emergencies, identifies the two focus areas: Digital health

 

“Complexity is Profitable” in U.S. Healthcare – How to Save a Quarter-Trillion Dollars

In the U.S., “Health care is complicated because complexity is profitable.” So explain Bob Kocher, MD, and Anuraag Chigurupati, in a viewpoint on Economic Incentives for Administrative Simplification, published this week in JAMA. Dr. Kocher, a physician who is a venture capitalist, and Chigurupati, head of member experience at Devoted Health, explain the misaligned incentives that impede progress in reducing administrative spending. This essay joins two others in the October 20, 2021 issue of JAMA which highlight administrative spending in American health care: Administrative Simplification and the Potential for Saving a Quarter-Trillion Dollars in Health Care by Nikhil Sahni, Brandon

 

Health Privacy and Our Ambivalent Tech-Embrace – Lessons for Digital Health Innovators

A new look into Americans’ views on health privacy from Morning Consult provides a current snapshot on citizens’ concerned embrace of technology — worried pragmatism, let’s call it. This ambivalence will flavor how health citizens will adopt and adapt to the growing digitization of health care, and challenge the healthcare ecosystem’s assumption that patients and caregivers will universally, uniformly engage with medical tools and apps and technologies. More Boomers are concerned with health data app privacy than Gen Z consumers, as the chart illustrates. 46% of U.S. adults said that health monitoring apps were not an invasion of privacy; 32%

 

A Nutrition Label for Health IT

“Shouldn’t we, as a society, demand a nutrition label on our algorithms?” asked Dr. John Halamka. Dr. Halamka, President of the Mayo Clinic Platform, was speaking at the HIMSS 2021 annual conference on the meeting’s digital channel. Artificial intelligence and health equity were two key themes discussed during #HIMSS21, and Dr. Halamka’s concerns echoed through the week-long event. To illustrate the need for a healthier approach to AI, he offered this scenario: “If I use a data set of one million Scandinavian Lutherans to create the most amazing EKG algorithm ever and then we decide to use it in Spain,

 

Our Pandemic Lessons: Listening to Michael Dowling – a #HIMSS21 Wrap-Up

“We don’t un-learn,” Dr. Amy Abernethy asserted as she shared her pandemic perspectives on a panel with 2 other former U.S. health policy and regulatory leaders. The three spoke about navigating compliance (think: regulations and reimbursement) in an uncertain world. An uncertain world is our workplace in the health/care ecosystem, globally, in this moment. So to give us some comfort in our collective foxhole, my last post for this week of immersion in #HIMSS21 is based on the keynote speech of Michael Dowling, CEO of Northwell Health. Dowling keynoted on the theme of “Leading for the Future,” sharing his lessons

 

IoT and The Rise of the Machines in Healthcare

As connected devices proliferate within health care enterprises and across the health care ecosystem, cybersecurity risks abound. During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, the health care sector was profoundly affected by cyber-attacks on connected devices, we learn in the report, Rise of the Machines 2021: State of Connected Devices – IT, IoT, IoMT and OT from Ordr. For this annual report, Ordr analyzed security risks across over 500 deployments in healthcare, life sciences, retail, and manufacturing sectors for the 12 months June 2020 through June 2021. In health care, outdated operating systems present some of the greatest risks:

 

Healthcare Via the Cloud, Across the Enterprise and in the Patient’s Home – a Sustainable View from Philips at HIMSS 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic sparked a reappraisal of value-based care, a shift to remote and virtual care, and acceleration of healthcare stakeholders’ investments in Artificial Intelligence-based solutions, Philips discovered in the 2021 Future Health Index, the company’s latest survey conducted among 2,800 health care leaders working in 14 countries. This week at the 2021 annual HIMSS conference, Philips is “making the case for moving to the cloud,” discussing the Philips HealthSuite, a cloud-based platform for connecting providers and patients, devices (and the data they generate), and care across the health care continuum. That’s a big promise and vision, so to kick

 

Empathy Is As Important as the Medical Treatment – the 2021 Accenture Health Experience As Backdrop to HIMSS 2021

The rise of digital health investment and growing role of technology in health care services only accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, people took on their own versions of digital transformation at home, for work, for school, for cooking, shopping, and indeed, for health care. But with digital health adoption gains has come some ambivalence and mixed signals, Accenture has discovered in its 2021 Health and life Sciences Experiences Survey released this week during the HIMSS Annual Conference. As the report concludes, “people’s sentiments and behaviors” with respect to technology in health care “provide no clear answer.”

 

Can the U.S. Improve Health System Performance with Digital Health Tools? Pondering A Big Question for #HIMSS21

Simply put, is the equation, “Spend more, get less” a sustainable business model? Of course not. But that’s the simple math on U.S. health care spending and what comes from it, according to Mirror, Mirror 2021: Reflecting Poorly, a perennial report from The Commonwealth Fund that compares health system performance across eleven developed countries. The first table details the metrics that the Fund compares across the eleven peer nations, which included Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The metrics compared were access to care, care process, administrative efficiency, equity,

 

Americans Grew Digital Health-Data Muscles in the Pandemic – New Insights from the Pew Charitable Trusts

“Most Americans clearly recognize the potential benefits that improved health IT can offer, and they want this transformation of the health care system to continue,” the Pew Charitable Trusts research concludes in Most Americans Want to Share and Access More Digital Health Data. The Pew team surveyed 1,213 adults ages 18 and over in June and July 2020, interviewing in English and Spanish. As digital health industry stakeholders will be convening at the 2021 annual HIMSS conference in Las Vegas and digitally, this report is well-timed to give us a level-set on just “where” U.S. health citizens are with respect to

 

Regulation, Reimbursement, and Interoperability Block Health Systems’ Digital Transformation – The State of Healthcare in 2021 From HIMSS

There is no doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic motivated health care providers, payers, and patients to adopt digital tools and contact-less services, allowing people to deliver and receive medical care. Still, 18 months into the pandemic, now endemic and in its fourth wave of cases spiking around the world and in many parts of the U.S., some aspects of “digital transformation” seem not to have fully transformed American healthcare, we learn in HIMSS’s annual 2021 State of Healthcare Report. HIMSS collaborated with the organizations Trust  Accenture, The Chartix Group, and ZS on this year’s research. Nine in ten clinicians have recommended

 

The Digital Home: A Platform for Health, via Deloitte and the COVID-19 “Stress Test”

Wherever you live in the world touched by the coronavirus pandemic, you felt (and were) stress-tested. Both you were, and your home was as well. In this year’s 2021 annual report by Deloitte into Connectivity & Mobile Trends, their report details How the pandemic has stress-tested the crowded digital home. This analysis was done, as it is every year, by the Deloitte Center for Technology, Media & Telecommunications. Deloitte’s Center commissioned an online survey among 2,009 U.S. consumers to gauge five generations of peoples’ perspectives on connected life in the context of COVID. The report covers the various life-flows of

 

The Pandemic Accelerated Consumers’ Digital Health Tech Ownership As Big Tech Morphs To Big Health

The pandemic ushered in millions of peoples’ first digital health experiences, many of which will persist according to the 23rd Annual U.S. Consumer Technology Ownership & Market Potential Study, published by the Consumer Technology Association. CTA conducted an online survey among 2,409 U.S. adult 18 and over in April 2021 to gather data for this annual report. To ensure a fair sample, CTA drew three datasets for the general population along with an Hispanic oversample and an oversample for people 65 years of age and older. The study looked at 83 consumer technology products and sub-categories, including many directly related

 

Nurses Hacking for Health and Compassionomics

The hearts and minds of nurses are fertile and inspirational sources and engines for health care innovation. This past weekend, and for the second time, I had the privilege and opportunity to be a panelist for the perennial hackathon meet-up of Nurse Hack 4 Health, sponsored by Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, Sonsiel, and DevUp. This round, the hackathon attracted hundreds of nurses from at least 20 countries and 30 U.S. states. Even a few students attended, a growing trend as academia recognizes the shortage of workers trained to solve thorny problems of the world. In health care, right here, right

 

COVID-19 Accelerated Digital Health Investments…But It Helps to Be Bigger, Mature and Scaling

“Compare digital health to airlines, cruise lines, and other industries” and the sector looks quite privileged, opined Matthew Holt in a discussion on a study diving deeply into the State of Digital Health, conducted by Catalyst @ Health 2.0 and sponsored by WIPFLI.. The research was conducted among 335 respondents, which included 182 digital health companies polled between November 2020 and March 2021. Digital health companies represented 60% of the sample, the other 40% of which were consulting firms, subsidiaries of providers/payers/life science companies and tech corporations, and investors. As Matthew called out, the digital health sector has a relatively

 

Emerging with A Stronger Healthcare System Post-COVID: NAM’s Lessons Learned

The coronavirus pandemic exposed weaknesses in the U.S. health care system that existed before the public health crisis. What lessons can be learned from the COVID-19 stress-test to build American health care back better? The National Academy of Medicine is publishing nine reports addressing health stakeholder segments impacted and re-shaped by COVID-19 — for public health, quality and safety, health care payers, clinicians, research, patients-families-communities, health product manufacturers, digital health, and care systems. The report on health care systems and providers was released this week:  COVID-19 Impact Assessment: Lessons Learned and Compelling Needs was authored by experts on the front-line

 

Managing the Risks of Fast-Growing Digital Health

Investments in the digital health sector have fast-grown in the past decade, reaching $14bn in 2020 based on Rock Health’s latest read on the market. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the field across many industry segments. With such turbocharged growth on the supply side, Beazley, experts in specialty insurance, explores the risks of digital health and wellness in a new report, Digital health, telehealth and wellness: Attitudes to risk and insurance. With great potential for both innovation and reward comes great risks: Beazley points to the facts that, over two-thirds of digital health companies lack insurance coverage for medical malpractice for

 

The Patient Safety Issue of Racial Disparities and the Opportunity for “Health Equity By Design”

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

 

How Young People Are Using Digital Tools to Help Deal with Mental Health

After a year of living with and “in” the coronavirus pandemic, younger people in the U.S. have had to deal with over twelve months of quarantine and lockdown, going to school remotely from home, and distancing from friends. For most young people, the public health crisis has been more about that social distancing from friends, a collective sense of isolation, and mental and behavioral health impacts. These dynamics and these young health citizens’ coping mechanisms are captured in the report, Coping with COVID-19: How Young People Use Digital Media to Manage Their Mental Health. Three organizations collaborated to conduct and

 

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

 

A New Health Literacy Pillar: Personal Data Stewardship

The growing use of APIs in health information technology innovation for patient care has been a boon to speeding development placed in the hands of providers and patients. Using APIs can help drive interoperability and make data “liquid” and useable. APIs can enable “Data liberación,” a concept proposed by Todd Park when he worked in the Obama administration. Without securing patients’ personal health data leveraging APIs, those intimate details are highly hackable explained in All That we Let In, a report from Knight Ink and Appr0ov. It is likely that behind growing health data hacks is the marginally greater financial

 

Ensuring That Humanity Retains Control of Connected Things: A Message from Microsoft at CES 2021

Artificial intelligence (AI) has begun to play a role in health care for predictive analytics, personalization, and public health. On 26th January, I’ll moderate a tweetchat at 1 pm Eastern time, brainstorming the current and future state of and opportunities for AI in health care. I’ll be co-chatting with Microsoft’s AI leader, Tom Lawry (@TCLawry on Twitter). In advance of that discussion, I wanted to feature remarks shared by Brad Smith, Microsoft President, that I recently heard at CES 2021, the annual (this year, virtual) meeting convening the largest community of consumer electronics stakeholders globally Smith wove a crucial, impactful

 

Trust Plummets Around the World: The 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer in #CES2021 and Microsoft Context

Citizens around the world unite around the concept that Trust is Dead. This is no truer than in the U.S., where trust in every type of organization and expert has plummeted in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, political and social strife, and an economic downturn. Welcome to the sobering 2021 Edelman Trust Barometer, released this week as the world’s technology innovators and analysts are convening at CES 2021, and the annual JP Morgan Healthcare meetup virtually convened. As the World Economic Forum succinctly put the situation, “2020 was the year of two equally destructive viruses: the pandemic and the

 

The Digital Consumer, Increasingly Connected to Health Devices; Parks Associates Kicking Off #CES2021

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic drove U.S. consumers to increase spending on electronics, notably laptops, smartphones, and desktop computers. But the coronavirus era also saw broadband households spending more on connecting health devices, with 42% of U.S. consumers owning digital health tech compared with 33% in 2015, according to research discussed in Supporting Today’s Connected Consumer from Parks Associates. developed for Sutherland, the digital transformation company. Consumer electronics purchase growth was, “likely driven by new social distancing guidelines brought on by COVID-19, which requires many individuals to work and attend school from home. Among the 26% of US broadband households

 

How COVID-19 Mobilized Participatory Health and the Importance of “Correct” Personal Health Records

explained in a new report from EY co-sponsored by the American Hospital Association (AHA) and the AHA Center for Health Innovation. Digital Transformation – Anywhere Care envisions “health care with no address, or bringing care to the consumer or patient rather than expecting the patient to go to the hospital” as a “vital sign” of health care’s changes going into the new year of 2021. COVID-19 accelerated a movement in which I’ve been involved for over a decade, known as “participatory health.” In its early phase in the U.S., Dr. Tom Ferguson identified the emerging role of the internet in

 

The COVID-19 Era Has Grown Health Consumer Demand for Virtual Care

Over one-half of Americans would likely use virtual care for their healthcare services, and one in four people would actually prefer a virtual relationship with a primary care physician, according to the fifth annual 2020 Consumer Sentiment Survey from UnitedHealthcare. What a difference a pandemic can make in accelerating patients’ adoption of digital health tools. This survey was conducted in mid-September 2020, and so the results demonstrate U.S. health consumers’ growing digital health “muscles” in the form of demand and confidence in using virtual care. One in four people would consider online options as their first-line to evaluating personal health

 

Data Well-Being: A Pillar of Health Citizenship for US Consumers

In the COVID-19 era, most U.S. consumers believe they have an obligation to share personal health information to stop the spread of the coronavirus. However, only 44% would be willing to share their personal data with a national database, a MITRE study learned. Only one-third of Americans would be willing to share their temperature, 29% their location, and one-fourth information about their chronic conditions. The Harris Poll conducted the study among 2,065 U.S. adults 18 and over in mid-June 2020 to gauge peoples’ perspectives on health data and privacy. Three-quarters of people in the U.S. believe that data privacy “is a

 

For Health Consumers, Trust, Privacy, & Good Experience Must Be Baked Into Digital Health Care

“Digital transformation” was the mantra for all industries before we heard about the COVID-19 virus. Since the emergence of the pandemic, the coronavirus has accelerated the adoption of digital platforms, AI, and ecommerce. That is at least as true for the health care sector as it has been for other industry segments. So, will the fast-adoption of virtual care and other forms of digitization in health care last? Accenture probes this question in a report published today asking, How Can Leaders Make Recent Digital Health Gains Last? In Accenture’s words, “COVID-19 forced a surge” in virtual health care following a

 

The Future of Health Is “Now,” Deloitte Says; But Are Consumers Living and Loving It?

The pandemic has become a sort of forcing function on all aspects of daily living, include health care. Deloitte’s latest wave of health care consumer market research updates the COVID-19 impacts on the U.S. health care landscape and asks the question in the study report’s title: “Are consumers already living the future of health?” For the general survey of U.S. Health Consumers, Deloitte polled 4,522 U.S. adults 18 and older online in February and March 2020. Deloitte conducted an additional 1,510 interviews with consumers in April to gauge peoples’ perspectives on the pandemic, health and well-being. In the Great Lockdown

 

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

 

The Home and Low-Touch Health Care – a Health Consumer Update from Capgemini

The coronavirus pandemic has been a wake-up call for patients-as-consumers, seeking lower-touch health care services at home or closer-to-home in community health hubs. The need for a holistic platform the serves up a continuum-of-care tools across the patient journey became evident in a matter of months, Capgemini Research Institute calls out in The Health Fix, a research report assessing peoples’ perspectives on health care in the Age of COVIOD-19. Capgemini conducted a survey among over 2,000 consumers living in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. in mid-June 2020. The report found three big shifts in global health citizens’

 

Addressing Health Equity Must Include Digital Equity Beyond Access To Medical Services and Insurance

The 21st Century Cures Act emphasizes patients’ control of personal health information. ONC rules issues in March 2020 called for more patient-facing health tools and apps to bolster health consumer engagement and empowerment. But the emergence of the coronavirus in the U.S. revealed many weakness in the American health care system, one of which has been health inequities faced by millions of people — especially black Americans, who have sustained higher rates morbidity and mortality for COVID-19. There have also been digital health divides found in the COVID-19 pandemic, discussed in a timely essay in JAMA, Digital Health Equity as

 

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

 

Consumers’ Embrace of Digital Health Tech Stalls, and Privacy Concerns Prevail – Accenture’s 2020 Research

Millions of dollars and developers’ time have been invested in conceiving and making digital health tools. Yet with that bullish supply side of digital health,  there was a marked decline in peoples’ use of them in the past two years, found by Accenture in their latest health consumer survey, Digital is Transforming Health, So Why is Consumer Adoption Stalling? Use of mobile apps to track personal health activity fell from nearly 1 in 2 consumers to 1 in 3. Use of wearable tech nearly halved, from 33% to 18%, between 2018 and 2020. Some, but not necessarily a majority, of

 

Why CTA’s Shepherding AI Is Important for Re-Imagining Healthcare

The Consumer Technology Association (CTA), collaborating with industry stakeholders, has ushered in a standard for artificial intelligence in health care.   CTA is the membership organization for companies that innovate, manufacture and market consumer-facing tech like big-screen TVs, slick new autos, video games and voice assistants. So what’s an organization like CTA doing with AI and health care? Let me connect the dots. Check out this graphic taken from my book, HealthConsuming: From Health Consumer to Health Citizen. This shows the ten categories of tech I revisit each year at CES, CTA’s annual mega-conference of new-new things in consumer electronics

 

Physicians Lean In to Digital Health, Especially Telehealth and Remote Monitoring

More U.S. doctors are using digital health tools in patient care, with quickening adoption of telehealth and remote monitoring technology, according to a study from the American Medical Association (AMA). This survey, conducted in 2019 among 1,359 U.S. physicians, follows up AMA’s research conducted in 2016 and largely reflects the original questionnaire to be able to understand real changes among doctors’ use of tech in practice. As part of this rigorous study design, AMA used particular definitions for the seven tools the study gauged: remote monitoring for efficiency, remote monitoring and management for improved care, clinical decision support, patient engagement,

 

Most Americans Are Curious and Hopeful About Genetics Research, But Privacy-Concerned

Most Americans associate more optimistic words with human genetics research than they do darker implications: “curious,” “hopeful,” “amazed.” and indeed “optimistic” ranked the top four impressions in peoples’ minds, based on a survey form the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG). Below these perceptions are a few concerning concepts such as “cautious,” “concerned,” “hesitant, and “skeptical,” the poll found. Based on the relatively positive views on genetics research, most Americans support increasing Federal funding for that research: 74% said it was somewhat or very important to do so, compared with 15% saying it was not important. People value genetics research

 

Dr. Roboto? Stanford Medicine Foresees Digital Doctors “Maturing”

Physicians are evolving as digital doctors, embracing the growing role of data generated in electronic health records as well as through their patients using wearable technologies and mobile health apps downloaded in ubiquitous smartphones, described in The Rise of the Data-Driven Physician, a 2020 Health Trends Report from Stanford Medicine Stanford Medicine interviewed 523 physicians and 210 medical students and residents in September and October 2019 to assess clinicians’ perspectives on digital health topics for this study. The study title citing the “data-driven physician” is based on the key survey finding that doctors are preparing to embrace data, from both traditional

 

Trust Is the Currency for Consumer Health Engagement – A Bottom-Line at CES 2020

There’s less talk about Bitcoin and cryptocurrency at #CES2020. The most important currency under discussion is Trust. We have begun a consumer electronics migration from the past decade of the Internet of Things to this next decade of the Intelligence of Things. The different “I’s” signal the transition from devices that have connected to the Internet and generated data from our everyday lives, to the next ten years of gathering that data, mashing it up for meaning, and feeding back intelligence to users in the form of advising, coaching, nudging — with potentially powerful feedback loops for health, wellness and

 

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

 

“Digital Health Is An Ecosystem of Ecosystems” – CTA’s 2020 Trends to Watch Into the Data Age

In CTA’s 2020 Consumer Tech Forecast launched yesterday at Media Day 1 at CES, Steve Koenig VP of Research, said that, “digital health is an ecosystem of ecosystems.” Health, medical and wellness trends featured large in the forecast, which brought together key trends for 5G, robotics, voice tech, AR/VR/XR, and the next iteration of IoT — which Steve said will still be called “IoT,” but in this phase will morph into the “Intelligence of Things.” That speaks to Steve’s phrase, “ecosystem of ecosystems,” because that’s not just “digital” health — that’s now the true nature of health/care, and what is

 

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.

 

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

 

Most Health Consumers Expect Technology To Play a Larger Role As Tech-Angst & Privacy Concerns Grow

As technology continues to re-shape consumers’ experiences and expectations with health/care, retail, travel and work, peoples’ concerns about data privacy are also growing as observed by a 2020 consumer trends forecast from GlobalWebIndex, Connecting the dots. First, some overall context to the study. GlobalWebIndex “connects the dots” of consumers trends in 2020 including the topics shown in the first graphic including commerce and retail, gaming, travel, human touch, nostalgia, privacy and digital health — the first of these trends discussed in the report. Note that the data discussed in this post include responses from consumers residing in both the U.S.

 

Will Technology Cure Americans’ Health Care System Ills? Considering Google and Ascension Health’s Data Deal

“Google’s ‘Project Nightingale’ Gathers Personal Health Data on Millions of Americans,” the Wall Street Journal reported in today’s paper and on the WSJ.com website. The story started with the scenario that, “Search giant is amassing health records from Ascension facilities in 21 states; patients not yet informed.” Here’s Ascension’s press release on the collaboration, described in the title as “healthcare transformation.” Note: this release was written after the Wall Street Journal published this story. And, according to the WSJ reporting, “Neither patients nor doctors have been notified. At least 150 Google employees already have access to much of the data

 

A Health Future with Lyft and Uber as Patient Data Stewards: Rock Health’s 2019 Consumer Survey

Patients searching online for health information and health care provider reviews is mainstream in 2019.  Digital health tracking is now adopted by 4 in 10 U.S. consumers. Rock Health’s Digital Health Consumer Adoption Report for 2019 was developed in collaboration with the Stanford Medicine Center for Digital Health. Rock Health’s research has tracked peoples’ use of telemedicine, wearable technology, digital health tracking, and online health information since 2015, and the results this round show relative flattening of adoption across these various tools. Rock Health’s top-line findings were that: Patient-generated health data creates opportunity, and potential challenges Online health information is

 

Learning from Dr. Eric Topol, Live from Medecision Liberation 2019

“Bold thinking is great. Bold doing is better,” Dr. Eric Topol introduced his talk yesterday at Medecision’s Liberation 2019 conference. I have the opportunity, for which I’m so grateful, of not only attending this meeting but playing a role as a speaker, a sometimes stage “emcee,” and a keynote speaker. And as an attendee, I learn so much from other speakers, fellow attendees, and Medecision staff all sharing perspectives during breakouts and networking breaks. In mode of attendee (and self-confessed collegial-groupie of Dr. Topol’s), I took in his remarks taking notes as fast as I could thanks to Mom teaching

 

Health Consumers Expect Healthcare to be Digital (and Secure), Philips Future Health Index Finds

Health care system financing, delivery, and workflows widely vary across nations around the world. Philips surveyed health care professionals and consumers living in 15 countries, from North America to Asia, and found that these health systems share one over-arching objective: to provide quality care with improved experiences for both patients and healthcare professionals. Being Philips, what underpins that quality and experience is technology; Philips explored telehealth, AI, digital health records (DHRs), and other digital health tools that can engage patients. Philips published results from this global study in The Future Health Index 2019, themed “Transforming healthcare experiences, exploring the impact

 

Americans Most-Trust Health Care Providers With Their Data – But Are They Right To Do So?

Americans least-trust social media companies, Internet search engines, and the Federal government to keep their personal information secure. Americans most-trust their doctors, their banks, and their hospitals to protect their personal information. Are people clear-headed about this perception? I pose, prompted by this month’s survey from POLITICO and the Harvard Chan School of Public Health on data privacy and e-cigarettes. The first table shows that major finding, with a view on the consumer’s political party identification. There are interesting results revealed by party ID: More Democrats trust doctors, hospitals, health plans, and credit card companies with their personal data. More

 

Talking “HealthConsuming” on the MM&M Podcast

Marc Iskowitz, Executive Editor of MM&M, warmly welcomed me to the Haymarket Media soundproof studio in New York City yesterday. We’d been trying to schedule meeting up to do a live podcast since February, and we finally got our mutual acts together on 6th August 2019. Here’s a link to the 30-minute conversation, where Marc combed through the over 500 endnotes from HealthConsuming‘s appendix to explore the patient as the new health care payor, the Amazon prime-ing of people, and prospects for social determinants of health to bolster medicines “beyond the pill.” https://www.pscp.tv/MMMnews/1eaJbvgovBYJX Thanks for listening — and if you

 

The Most Important Trends For Health in Mary Meeker’s 2019 Internet Report Aren’t About Health Care

The health care section of Mary Meeker’s 334-page annual report, Internet Trends 2019, comprises 24 of those pages (270 through 293). These two dozen exhibits detail growing adoption of digital tech in health care, the growth of genomics and EHR adoption, examples of these tools from “A” (Apple) to “Z” (Zocdoc), and on the last page of that chapter, medical spending in the U.S., the highest in raw and per capita numbers versus the rest of the world. But the most important implications for American health care aren’t found in those pages: they’re in other parts of the report addressing

 

The Persistent Rural/Urban Broadband Gap Is Bad for Health

              In the U.S., rural residents’ access to broadband at home continues to lag behind urban and suburban dwellers, the Pew Research Group noted in a May 2019 research note on Americans’ use of technology. The Pew survey explored Americans’ adoption of technology and found that rural dwellers are also less likely to have multiple devices than non-rural consumers. Across the four types of tech studied, it’s smartphones that top the list of penetration in rural areas (at 71%), closely followed by computers (desktop or laptop, with 69% adoption), broadband (at 63%) and tablets

 

Isn’t It Eyeconic? Vision Care in the Evolving Health Care Ecosystem

The vision/optical industry is one piece of the health/care ecosystem, but the segment has not been as directly impacted by patients’ new consumer muscles until just about now. It feels like the vision industry is at an inflection point at this moment, I intuited during yesterday’s convening of Decoding the Consumer: The new science of customer behavior, the theme of the 13th annual global leadership summit hosted by Vision Monday, a program of Jobson Medical Information which is part of the WebMD family. I was grateful to have an opportunity to share my views with attendees on the vision patient as

 

Digital Transformation Is The New Mantra But Can’t Happen Without Access To Connectivity

As more of our “things” get digitally connected, there’s an unanswered question about how our connected lives impact human life and health. A new report from the OECD asks and answers: How’s Life in the Digital Age? Opportunities and Risks of the Digital Transformation for People’s Well-being. This research is part of OECD’s ongoing series asking the Big Question, “How’s Life?” A prevailing current mantra in work and daily living is “digital transformation.” The OECD broadly defined the phrase in their 2017 paper on the topic as follows: Mobility, cloud computing, the Internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and big

 

Costs, Consumerism, Cyber and Care, Everywhere – The 2019 Health Populi TrendCast

Today is Boxing Day and St. Stephens Day for people who celebrate Christmas, so I share this post as a holiday gift with well-wishes for you and those you love. The tea leaves have been brewing here at THINK-Health as we prepared our 2019 forecast at the convergence of consumers, health, and technology. Here’s our trend-weaving of 4 C’s for 2019: costs, consumerism, cyber and care, everywhere… Health care costs will continue to be a mainstream pocketbook issue for patients and caregivers, with consequences for payors, suppliers and ultimately, policymakers. Legislators inside the DC Beltway will be challenged by the

 

The Smartphone Is the Consumer’s Personal Health Platform – Implications from Deloitte’s 2018 Survey

  American consumers are now viewing their phones an average of 52 times daily, with 39 percent of consumers believing they use their smartphones too much. In fact, 60 percent of 18 to 34-year-olds admit to smartphone overuse, the highest level of any age group. However, 63 percent of the respondents reported trying to limit their smartphone usage, roughly half succeeding in cutting back. Smartphones also are helping blur the lines between work and leisure with 70 percent of respondents using personal smartphones at least occasionally for after-hours work. Furthermore, voice technologies are “making noise,” according to Deloitte in A New Era

 

Koen Kas, the Gardener of Health Tech Delights

The future of healthcare is not about being sick, Prof. Dr. Koen Kas believes. Having spent many years in life sciences in both research and as an entrepreneur, Koen now knows that getting and staying healthy isn’t about just developing medicines and med-tech: optimally, health requires a tincture of delight, Koen advises in his breakthrough, innovative book, Your Guide to Delight. Healthcare must go beyond traditional user-centered design, Koen’s experience has shown, and aspire toward design-to-delight. The concept of “delight” in healthcare, such as we experience in hospitality, grocery stores, and entertainment, is elusive. I’ve observed this, too, in my

 

The Single Market for Healthcare in Europe: Learnings for the U.S.

When I asked my longtime colleague and friend Robert Mittman, with whom I collaborated at Institute for the Future for a decade, how he managed international travel and jet lag, he said simply, “The time zone you’re in is the time zone you’re in.” This lesson has stayed with me since I received Robert’s advice over twenty years ago. Over the next two weeks, as I work alongside colleagues and clients in the EU and soon-to-Brexit UK, I am in time zones five and six hours later than my home-base of US Eastern Time. But the time zones I’m working

 

If Data Is The New Oil in Healthcare, Will It Be Safe to Drink? The Accenture Digital Health Tech Vision 2018

With the vast majority of patients’ medical records now digitized in electronic health records systems, the opportunities to mine, learn from, and act on the findings are promising for U.S. healthcare. More data is moving into internet clouds every day, from healthcare encounters with clinicians and inpatient hospital stays to prescribed medicines, retail receipts for over-the-counter remedies, wearable technologies, credit card swipes for products and services, and GPS check-ins. That’s a treasure trove of digital footprints that can tell a lot about us as patients, either in real-time or via prediction. But can we nudge stakeholders in health and healthcare

 

What the Pew Data on Americans’ Views on Technology Means for Healthcare

Most Americans say that pharmaceutical manufacturers, banks, advertisers, energy firms, and tech companies have too much power and influence in today’s American economy, according to Public Attitudes Toward Technology Companies, a research report from the Pew Research Center. A plurality of Americans says labor unions and farming and agriculture have too little power, along with a majority of people who believe that small business lacks sufficient power in the current U.S. economy. This data point is part of a larger consumer survey on Americans’ attitudes about the growing role of technology in society, particularly with respect to political and social impacts.

 

Doctors Say EHRs Are Good for Storage, But Risky for Patient Relationships and Burnout

Doctors have a complicated relationship with electronic health records (EHRs): two-thirds of primary care providers (PCPs) see value in digital records (EHRs), but at the same time believe the technology has weakened relationships with patients, detracted from clinical effectiveness, and lack streamlined user experience. That deficiency is, in three words, lack of interoperability; that challenge has required one-half of physician-users to use work-around’s to make their EHR investments more useful. These insights come out of a survey conducted among primary care providers by The Harris Poll for Stanford Medicine, published to coincide with the medical school’s convening of the EHR

 

Re-Imagining Healthcare – a Lesson from Von Clausewitz in the Fog of War

When you’re on the battlefield and you can’t see what lies ahead, go high, recommended General Von Clausewitz in his book, On War. I paraphrase this prescription from the good General-strategist’s book, On War — “War is the realm of uncertainty; three-quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty. A sensitive and discriminating judgment is called for; a skilled intelligence to scent out the truth.” Governor Mark Leavitt, who held the post of Secretary of Health and Human Services under President Bush, offered this advice at the recent Liberation

 

Nudging Patients to Use EHRs: Moving Toward a Tipping Point for Consumer Health IT

Half of U.S. patients were offered online access to their health records by providers or insurers, and one-half of them accessed the EHR at least once in the last year.  One in four of those offered online EHR access looked at them more than 3 times. It takes a good nudge from a provider to motivate a patient to access online medical records, found by ONC in their latest research into consumers’ use of EHRs detailed in Individuals’ use of online medical records and technology for health needs, the ONC Data Brief No. 40, published April 2018. he concept of

 

How the Latest on Facebook and the “Deep State” Could Undermine Patient Data Sharing and AI

There’s a potential large obstacle that could prevent the full benefits of the current go-go, bullish forecasts for artificial intelligence (AI) to help make healthcare better: a decline in consumers’ willingness to share their personal data. Along with the overall erosion of peoples’ trust in government and other institutions comes this week’s revelations about Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, and the so-called Deep State. Three-fourths of Americans believe that some type of “Deep State” in the federal government exists, a new poll from Monmouth University published yesterday. I clipped the responses to three of the survey’s most relevant questions here. Not only

 

Wearable, Shareable, Virtual: The Demands of the Digital Health Consumer in 2018

As I wrote here in April 2017, telehealth and virtual healthcare are mainstreaming. This week at the 2018 annual HIMSS conference, telehealth is playing a mainstream role in discussions about right-sizing and right-placing healthcare.     The evidence for telehealth’s tipping point is rooted in new research published today by Accenture on Patients + Doctors + Machines, Accentures’ 2018 Consumer Survey on Digital Health. I sat down today with Dr. Kaveh Safavi who leads Accenture’s healthcare practice to discuss the results of this study into peoples’ atttudes toward healthcare technology and innovation. Three in four consumers in America say technology is

 

How One Hospital System Baked Love Into Their Health App

On July 18, 2017, Neil Gomes, Chief Digital Officer at Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health in Philadelphia, tweeted this: When I saw this tweet, I was especially struck by Gomes’s phrase, “Designed & developed with heart/love by my @DICEGRP.” That’s Jefferson’s health solutions group that focuses on digital innovation and consumer experience. Here’s a health system that’s focused on that customer experience, which has become a critical success factor for healthcare to thrive. That’s because, as Steve Laughlin, VP and General Manager of IBM’s Global Consumer Group recently explained to me, a consumer’s last great customer experience becomes the

 

Add Behavioral Data to Social Determinants For Better Patient Understanding

“Health agencies will have to become at least as sophisticated as other consumer/retail industries in analyzing a variety of data that helps uncover root causes of human behavior,” Gartner recommended in 2017. That’s because “health” is not all pre-determined by our parent-given genetics. Health is determined by many factors in our own hands, and in forces around us: physical environment, built environment, and public policy. These are the social determinants of health, but knowing them even for the N of 1 patient isn’t quite enough to help the healthcare industry move the needle on outcomes and costs. We need to

 

#Engage4Health: How Patients Are Morphing Into Healthcare Consumers, for #HIMSS18

This blog appears today as part of a #HIMSS18 primer series for attendees, and the industry at large, to discuss major health IT issues that will help move health and healthcare delivery forward in 2018 – and beyond. I’m grateful to HIMSS to be one of 20 Social Media Ambassadors appointed for this year’s conference, which convenes in Las Vegas at the Sands Expo Center from March 5 to 9th, 2018.  Prioritizing the patient-as-consumer through my health economic lens, the biggest priorities will be: Engaging patients in self-care and driving health and health plan literacy to better manage constrained access

 

Hug Your Physician: S/He Needs It – Listening to the 2018 Medscape National Physician Burnout & Depression Report

Two in five U.S. physicians feels burned out, according to the Medscape National Physician Burnout & Depression Report for 2018. This year, Medscape explicitly adds the condition of “depression” to its important study, and its title. In 2017, the Medscape report was about bias and burnout. Physicians involved in primary care specialties and critical care are especially at-risk for burnout, the study found. One in five OBGYNs experience both burnout and depression. Furthermore, there’s a big gender disparity when it comes to feeling burned out: nearly one-half of female physicians feel burnout compared with 38% of male doctors. Being employed by

 

Smarter, Streamlined, Connected Consumers – The Promise of CES 2018

Journalists and industry analysts from around the globe have come to Las Vegas which, this week, is the mecca for new-new electronic things that companies think consumers will be keen to buy. On media day 1, I spoke with a colleague from the Netherlands who covers audio, a sector that’s certainly in disruption; an automotive analyst from India covering autonomous vehicles; and, a mobile tech guru based in Dubai, to identify just a few of my media friends who have gathered here to research and write on their respective beats. In these conversations, there are some common buzzwords floating around

 

What Patients Feel About Technology, Healthcare Costs and Social Determinants

U.S. consumers feel positive about the roles of technology and social determinants in improving healthcare, but are concerned about costs, according to the 2017 Patient Survey Report conducted for The Physicians Foundation. The survey gauged patients’ perspectives across four issues: the physician-patient relationship, the cost of healthcare, social determinants of health, and lifestyle choices. Two key threads in the research explain how Americans feel about healthcare in the U.S. at this moment: the role of technology and the cost of health care. First, the vast majority of consumers view technology, broadly defined, as important for their health care. 85% of people

 

Consumers Use Digital Health Tools But Still Struggle with Health Literacy

While more U.S. patients are use digital health tools and take on more clinical and financial decision making for their health care, people also have gaps in health engagement and health literacy. Three studies published in early October 2017 provide insights into the state of healthcare consumerism in America. The 2017 UnitedHealthcare Consumer Sentiment Survey found that a plurality of Americans (45%) turn first to primary care providers (doctors or nurses) as their source for the first source of information about specific health symptoms, conditions or diseases. 28% of people also use the internet or mobile health apps as their

 

The Rx is UX: A Prescription for EHRs and Patient Engagement

It’s National Health IT Week (#NHIT Week), and I’m revisiting research published earlier this year to connect the dots between EHR implementation (good news: it’s nearly universal in doctors’ offices and hospitals) and patients embracing their health information (not-so-much). What’s missing: UX design and respect for peoples’ life-flows.  Most physician practices and hospitals in the U.S. have installed electronic health records (EHRs). But in a classic Field of Dreams scenario, we have made patients’ medical records digital, but people aren’t asking for them or accessing them en masse. “How do we make it easier for patients to request and manage their

 

Leveraging the Essential Data of Life: Health 2.0 – Day 1 Learnings

The future of effective and efficient healthcare will be underpinned by artful combinations of both digital technologies and “analog humans,” if the first day of the Health 2.0 Conference is a good predictor. Big thoughts about a decentralized future in healthcare kicked off Day 1 of the 11th annual Health 2.0 Conference in Santa Clara, CA. The co-founders of Health 2.0 (H20), Matthew Holt and Indu Subaiya, explained the five drivers of the tech-enabled health future. 1. The new interoperability, underpinned by FHIR standards and blockchain. “FHIR” stands for fast healthcare interoperability resources, which are informatics standards that enable data

 

To Meet Health Consumers’ Digital Demands, Think Netflix and Verizon

  Health consumers have become savvy about the role of technology in their healthcare, according to a survey from Ambra, a company that is in the health cloud business. The survey paints a picture of health consumers hungry for digital health connections. The most popular activities patients do online for health were: To research symptoms and treatments To renew and/or fill prescriptions To view lab reports To make appointments To pay medical bills To correspond with the nurse or doctor To view imaging reports To get virtual care, and, To participate in patient communities. To meet patients where they want

 

Envisioning Healthcare Innovation and Value with Microsoft

Fast Company’s October 2017 issue leads with a cover story featuring Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella, with the title, “Microsoft Rewrites the Code.” The issue of Fast.Co is devoted to the theme of innovation by design, and the 8-page story on the company emphasizes the themes of empathy and collaboration in re-imagining the organization. I lead with this because I’m now in Orlando preparing to participate in Microsoft’s annual meeting called Envision. This conference brings together the company’s clients from around the world, representing major industry segments. I’m grateful to be invited to participate in the first of six sessions devoted

 

Weaving Accenture’s Five Digital Health Technology Trends for 2017

Technology should serve people, and Accenture has identified five major key trends that, together, could forge a person-centered, -friendly, -empowering healthcare system. This is Accenture’s Digital Health Technology Vision for 2017. “Should” and “could” are the important adverbs here, because if tech doesn’t deliver, driving efficiency and effectiveness, personalizing medical treatments, and inspiring people to become more health literate and health-engaging, then tech is just a Field of Dreams being built and available, with no people taking advantage of the potential benefits. The five new-new tech trends are: AI is the new UI, where healthcare experience is everything Ecosystem power

 

Artificial Intelligence, AI, Is Becoming the New Operating System in Health – Accenture

Artificial Intelligence, AI, can help drive the Triple Aim in healthcare, reducing cost, improving quality, and expanding access, according to Artificial Intelligence: Healthcare’s New Nervous System from Accenture. Acquisitions of AI developers in health will be fast-paced, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 40% – “explosive” in the word of Accenture – moving from $600 mm in 2014 to $6.6 billion in 2021. What these AI startups will do is to enable machines to sense, comprehend, act and learn, Accenture foresees, to augment administrative and clinical tasks which could free up healthcare labor (say, doctors, other clinicians, and accountants)

 

Helping People On A Path to Better Health with CVS @Retail

“Helping people on their path to better health” is the mission-mantra of CVS Health. Re-branded from its previous identity as CVS/pharmacy, the organization convened a Health Innovation Summit with its vendor partners whose products fill the front-of-store shelves to empower, inspire and support consumers to manage health and wellness for themselves and their families. I was grateful for the opportunity to provide the first talk for the day, setting the context for the evolving retail health/care landscape with the consumer at the center. The consumer is, at any point in a 24-hour day: a person wearing many hats (a worker,

 

U.S. Consumers Expect, But Don’t See, Innovation From the Health & Wellness Industry

U.S. consumers consider Consumer Electronics to be the most innovative industry they know. But people believe that Health & Wellness should be the most innovative sector in the economy. Welcome to the 2017 Klick Health Consumer Survey, which focuses on health innovation in the context of peoples’ hopes for technology to improve health and healthcare. 1 in 2 people say that technology has had a positive impact on their health and wellness, skewing slightly more toward younger people (although 45% of people 55 years of age and older agree that tech positively contributes to health. 41% of consumers say they’ve

 

Digital Healthcare At the Inflection Point, Via Mary Meeker

Healthcare is at a digital inflection point, asserts   Internet Trends 2017 – Code Conference, by the iconic Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins. Published May 31, 2017, few tech-focused reports have the gravitas or generate the readership that this report does. I’m one of Meeker’s perennial readers, covering this report through my health/care lens here on Health Populi for several years (links to previous posts below). Of the report’s 355 pages, 22 are devoted to healthcare (pages 288-319), a section curated by Noah Kaufman of KP. This section of the report assembles data from a range of publicly available sources,

 

Building Digital Trust Is Now Part of Serving Up Healthcare

The most trusted stewards for protecting consumers’ health data are “my providers:” “my” physician (88%), “my” pharmacy (85%), and “my” hospital” (84%). according to the Accenture 2017 Consumer Survey on Healthcare Cybersecurity and Digital Trust. Who’s least-trusted? Government (56%) and tech companies (57%). Note, though, that most Americans (over 50%) trust these health data holders — it’s just that fewer people trust them than healthcare providers, who are top health information protectors in health consumers’ trust rosters. Accenture commissioned Nielsen to conduct this survey in November 2016 in seven countries. The results discussed here in Health Populi focus on the