A blog covering the health/care ecosystem and people.

In his latest book, Notes on Being a Man, Scott Galloway discusses his personal fertility journey in the larger social context of what it means to be a man in modern America. Galloway’s infertility challenges shared with his wife inform his views on men’s health across all dimensions — physical, mental health, social health, financial well-being — and how, of course, men’s overall health is also a women’s and children’s issue. Men can feel “left out” of infertility discussions, based on results from the first and largest multi-national study into men’s feelings about their infertility revealed. “How men feel about

“What do consumers want from their health technology?” wondered a poll conducted among smartphone-owning health care decision makers. Greater control and engagement in health care, assurance of privacy and security for their health data. and greater personalization of advice coming out of the analysis of that shared personal health information. Welcome to the Consumer Survey on Personal Health Technology, market research conducted  by Verily with The Harris Poll among 2,000 U.S. adults 18 and older in July 2025. The screening criteria used to include a survey respondent were two-fold: whether they owned a smartphone, and made the majority of their

A couple of days into the U.S. Federal government shutdown, there’s one message the Congressional Democrats are tending to voice: that is that health care is on the line, and that’s the issue on which they’re betting will bring negotiators back to Capitol Hill — expecting a few Republicans to join in that dialogue. Most U.S. adults across political parties would want to see  Congress extend the enhanced Affordable Care Act tax credits that are set to expire next year we see in a poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation published October 3. And that includes most Republicans and MAGA

The idea of “hospitality” in health care is not new, but the nature of how patients-as-consumers are dealing with health care choices based on what looks and feels good is changing the nature of what hospitality means in technology-enabled health care delivery, we learn from the 2025 Patient Consumer Survey conducted by JLL. Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. (JLL)  is one of the largest global commercial real estate firms with a strong portfolio of medical buildings. So it is worthwhile to track what the company is learning about health care delivery distributed both inside and outside of brick-and-mortar medical buildings.    

“The truism that no one is completely safe until everyone is safe is a truism because it happens to be true.”                  So caution Michael Osterholm, epidemiologist, professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, and director of CIDRAP (the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the U-MN) and collaborating writer Mark Olshaker in their new book, The Big One. (In this post, for the sake of brevity, I’ll refer to the two authors as “O&O”). Simply put, the tagline tells us what we are about to read: a

Close to 100% of U.S. doctors agree that misinformation and/or disinformation undermines patient care, according to a new survey from the Physicians Foundation. The Foundation polled over 1,000 U.S. physicians in late May 2025 to gauge doctors’ perspectives on information and patients’ health literacy.                 Furthermore, over one-half of physicians believe that misinformation – and/or disinformation — significantly impacts the ability to deliver quality patient care. The first graphic differentiates between “misinformation” and “disinformation,” where the latter is false or inaccurate information deliberately intended to mislead people. Misinformation is somewhat more benign in

“Big Pharma has a new vision for selling drugs. It’s going to the mattresses,” writes Josh Nathan-Kazis in MSN earlier this week. That is, going direct-to-consumer (DTC) the way the mattress industry has done in the past decade, cutting out brick-and-mortar sleep shops at retail. In the case of “Make(ing” like a mattress company,” Josh explains, the pharma manufacturers “sell shots and pills straight to the consumer.” In this case, that’s cutting out the pharmacy benefits managers and other intermediaries that have taken dollars in the transactions of drug benefit claims which have added costs to payers (health plan sponsors

Most Americans, thinking as health consumers, believe that tariffs could impact peoples’ ability to pay for costly prescription drugs and be priced out of paying for check-ups and medical supplies, based on results from two studies on consumers’ views on tariffs and their health care from Ipsos and Q-Centrix.             Ipsos’s consumer survey found that younger consumers, people earning lower incomes, and folks living in the suburbs feel even more stressed about tariffs’ impact on medical care — along with more people identifying as Democrats or Independent voters.             With

Joining the ranks of technology heavyweights Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Google, and OpenAI, as well as digital health innovators Noom, Oura, Virta Health and Welldoc, who have pledged to “Make Health Tech Great Again,” Albertsons, one of the largest grocery chains in the U.S., put its name on the list with these and other early adopter collaborators. The Albertsons’ company blog published on 31 July discussed the background and rationale for this decision.             “Specifically, we pledge to explore how our Sincerely Health platform can connect to The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Aligned

The pandemic era re-shaped consumers’ views on food as an input for health across all dimensions. We look back with affection for our local grocery stores and pharmacies which played leading roles as first responders f0r our health and, quite literally, the basic needs at the base of our personal hierarchies the way Maslow conceived them. As I tracked home-bound consumers’ behaviors from the start of COVID-19 in March 2020, I hunted-and-gathered data from Nielsen, Acosta, Circana, Gallup, Harris, and other sources of consumers @ retail. The DIY food-health concept, coined by Nielsen, was the build-up of our “pandemic pantries.”

For the third year in a row, medical cost trend — the expected increase of health care costs by health plans — will be 8.5% for group health insurance. This contrasts with a low of 5.5% in 2022 when cost trend dipped coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic….then shot up to 8.0% the following year in patients’ healthcare catch-up mode.                 Welcome to Behind the Numbers 2026, the annual medical trend report from PwC. What’s continuing to drive up health care costs? PwC identifies 4 medical cost inflators, and 2 “deflators” (these being

By 2033, national health spending will comprise 20.3% of the U.S. GDP, based on the latest national health expenditure projections developed by researchers from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). This growth will be happening as CMS projects coverage of insured people to decline over the period.               Earlier today, I attended a media briefing hosted by Health Affairs to receive the CMS team’s top-line forecast of NHE from 2024 to 2033 discussing these findings. Fuller details on the projections will be released in the July issue of Health Affairs on 7

Across all U.S. voters, the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” Act (BBB) is seen unfavorably by nearly a 2:1 margin. Underneath that top-line, Democrats, Independents, and non-MAGA Republicans oppose it, while MAGA supporters favor it. But favorability erodes when people hear about possible health impacts, we learn in the June 2025 Health Tracking Poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation. The details on views of the BBB Act are shown in the first bar chart, with overwhelming disfavor among Democrats and Independents, and majority unfavorability among non-MAGA GOP supporters.                 Next check into partisans’ lenses

“While children are the group that may be most impacted by the widespread deployment of generative AI, they are simultaneously the group least represented in decision-making processes relating to the design, development, deployment or governance of AI,” we learn in Understanding the Impacts of Generative AI Use on Children, research conducted by The Alan Turing Institute in partnership with the LEGO Group. But it’s the children who shared their perspectives who can teach adults about some potential positive and negative aspects of GenAI, and help inform us in managing downside risks. FYI, The Institute is headquartered in the British Library

It’s been a full week’s coverage on food-as-medicine and food as a driver of health in America this week on the Health Populi blog. Today we turn to the chefs at Escoffier who know food, teach food, and now offer programs in holistic nutrition and wellness through the lens of culinary arts. With that lens, Escoffier recently published a report on the future of healthy eating, which will round out this week’s Health Populi landscape on food and health.           In the paper, the Escoffier team curated data points from many studies — via Gallup, Mintel, Innova,

There are many ways to measure the dysfunction of health care in the U.S.: we can point to relatively poor incomes relative to the rest of the developed world, given how much money is allocated to health care in America. The maternal mortality rate in the U.S. is unconscionably high, akin to some middle- and lower-income nations in the world. And medical debt is a uniquely American form of financial toxicity compared with other OECD nations where the concept is, well, foreign. Even with these many failures, though, it’s important to put U.S. health care in a larger context: the

Kindness + efficiency + listening + personalization: together, these are the most important experiences consumers seek from health care touchpoints, we learn in Humanizing Brand Experience: Healthcare Edition from Monigle.                      In this 8th volume of the company’s Humanizing series, Monigle tracks a different pattern of patient engagement — to be sure, built on trust, yet not just as a health consumer dealing with a diagnosed condition — but more holistically for getting me and keeping me healthy and well. The implication and recommendation here is to deliver even more personalized care

In the past year, most consumers in the U.S. have used virtual care, tracked at least one health metric digitally, and own a wearable or connected health device. Digital health has certainly gone mainstream across U.S. consumers, with varying utilization and motivation by generation, we learn in the report,   Screenagers to Silver Surfers: How each generation clicks with care from Rock Health.               To segment health consumers by age/generation, the RH team mined the firm’s 10th Consumer Adoption of Digital Health Survey which polled over 8,000 U.S. adults in 2024 on peoples’ perspectives

As Weight Watchers prepares to initiate bankruptcy proceedings, I file the news event under “thinking the unthinkable.”                     “Thinking about the unthinkable” is what Herman Kahn, a father of scenario planning, asked us to do when he pioneered the process. In this book, for Kahn, “the unthinkable” was thermonuclear war, and the year was 1962. The book was tag-lined as “must reading for an informed public” and in it, Kahn             I’ve been drawn back to this book lately because of a more intense workflow using

Americans’ financial health was already stressing consumers out leading up to Liberation Day, April 2nd, when President Trump announced tariffs on dozens of countries with whom the U.S. buys and sells goods. A new report from MoneyLion and Mastercard called Health is Wealth is well-timed for today’s Health Populi blog. The study was fielded by The Harris Poll online among 2,092 U.S. adults 18 and older between February 28 and March 4, 2025, so it was completed a month before the tariffs came to hit peoples’ 401(k) savings and employers’ company stock market caps.              

The health care landscape in 2030 will feature an expanded consumer health industry that will become, “an established branch of the health ecosystem focused on promoting health, preventing, disease, treating symptoms and extending healthy longevity,” according to a report published by Deloitte in September 2024, Accelerating the future: The rise of a dynamic consumer health market. While this report hit the virtual bookshelf about six months ago, I am revisiting it on this first day of the second quarter of 2025 because of its salience in this moment of uncertainties across our professional and personal lives — particularly related to

New data from the American Time Use Survey, research conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, shows that Americans now favor eating in-home compared with eating out at restaurants. Corroborating this shift is other data from the National Restaurant Association sharing that 74% of all restaurant traffic in 2023 came from “off premises” customers — that is, from takeout and delivery — up from 61% in the pre-COVID era. What does this mean for our health, well-being, and sense of community and connectivity?             I’m preparing a new talk to

While most people in the U.S. who have used large language models (like ChatGPT) for informal learning, entertainment, and getting information about products and services, 39% of U.S. adults have also tapped into LLMs to source information about physical or mental health. This insight is brought to us in the brilliantly titled report, Close encounters of the AI kind, from the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University. The principle author of the survey report is the Center’s Director, Lee Rainie, whose name many of you will know from his two+ decade career at the Pew Research Center (and

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

In the U.S., there are some issues that still unite most Americans in 2025. We can agree that, • The cost of eggs is too high • AI can be both exciting and promising at the same time as concerning • It sucks to have your personal data cyberattacked and breached, and, • Having access to telehealth is important. While I would be really sad to give up my omelets, I’m sticking a mindful toe into AI for some simple workflows, and I’m still dealing with the aftermath of the Change Healthcare data breach, it’s the looming telehealth deadline that’s

How will we know if the life sciences sector is advancing in 2025? This is the question asked at the start of the report, a Research Brief: 2025 Indicators of Progress for the Life Sciences Sector, from the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science (IQVIA).               To answer that question, IQVIA identified ten indicators for this 2025 profile on the life sciences sector. I selected four key data points for this discussion which provide particularly informative insights for my advisory work right now at the intersection of health, people/consumers, and technology: Trust for/with/in life science

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

At the start of each new year comes the World Economic Forum meet-up in Davos, Switzerland and with that conference start today, 20 January 2025, the publication of the Edelman Trust Barometer. Now in the study’s 25th annual edition, the Edelman Trust Barometer this year finds us, globally, in a Crisis of Grievance which is eroding trust. Edelman surveyed 1,150 residents (plus or minus) in each of 28 countries around the world, yielding over 33,000 citizens’ voices sharing perspectives on trust and institutions. Interviews were fielded from late October to mid-November 2024.                 

People are living everyday life in digital coexistence — where the connected technologies we use for communication and entertainment now enable life-flows across our lives, morning to night, at work and play and even while we’re sleeping. Welcome to the five key tech-trends for 2025, brought to life Sunday afternoon by Melissa Harrison, CTA’s Vice President of Marketing & Communications tag-teaming with Brian Comiskey, Senior Director, Innovation & Trends. This annual session at CES always provides a practical context for exploring the annual conference, the largest in the world covering technology used by everyday people. And this year, the trends

Most health citizens in the U.S. trust the CDC, NIH, and FDA, and most people also want the 47th incoming President Donald Trump to strengthen health/care institutions — from the VA and FDA to Medicare, Medicaid, as well as the CDC and Affordable Care Act. The Axios/Ipsos American Health Index, published this week, reveals both concurrence among U.S. health consumers with some striking differences across political party ID. Axios and Ipsos fielded a survey among 1,002 U.S. adults in early December to glean peoples’ perspectives on health, trust, and a variety of health and social policies.        

Among 127 health determinants, two rank highest: digital divides in the era of tech-enabled health  and care: digital divides that shape a person’s political, economic, and social environment, and the person’s health/disability status.               The digital transformation of health and care compel us to re-consider and re-frame social determinants of health in the “digital age,” which is what the World Health Organization in collaboration with the London School of Economics have done in research, published this week in the report, Addressing health determinants in a digital age. The report was funded by the European

“It’s the economy stupid,” Jennifer Tescher, CEO of the Financial Health Network, titles her latest column in Forbes. Published two weeks after the 2024 U.S. elections, Jennifer’s assertion sums up what, ex post facto, we know about what most inspired American voters at the polls in November 2024: the economy, economics, inflation, the costs of daily living….pick your noun, but it’s all about those Benjamins right now for mainstream American consumers across many demographic cuts. With that realization, we must remind ourselves as we enter a new year under a second-term President Trump that health care spending for everyday people

For health care, there are many uncertainties as we reflect, one week after the 2024 U.S. elections, on probably policy and market impacts that we can expect in 2025 and beyond. In today’s Health Populi post, I’ll reflect on the first of several certainties we-know-we-know about U.S. health citizens and key factors shaping the American health ecosystem. In this first of several posts on “What Stays True for U.S. Health Care Post #Election2024,” I’ll focus on U.S. consumer dissatisfaction with drug prices — across political party identification.          Let’s set the context with data from a recently-published

“Peace and health are inextricably connected,” the Editors of the AMA Journal of Ethics introduce an issue of the journal devoted to Peace in Health Care published November 2024.             In this timely journal issue, we can explore nearly one dozen essays exploring the interrelationship between peace and health in various clinical, care, and community settings — including hospice, maternal/child care, built environments, and adjacencies looking at the use of psychedelics and music for quieting one’s inner voices. You, the reader, will find your own favorite issues to explore based on your work, values, and interests.

Today marks eight days before #Election2024 in the U.S. While many political pundits assert that “health care is not on the ballot,” I contend it is on voters’ minds in many ways — related to the economy (the top issue in America), social equity, and even immigration (in terms of the health care workforce). In today’s Health Populi blog, I’m digging into  Access Denied: patients speak out on insurance barriers and the need for policy change, a study conducted by Ipsos on behalf of PhRMA, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America — the pharma industry’s advocacy organization (i.e., lobby

The marketing for purchasing digital health technologies is expecting to grow, driven by increased consumer demands for tech-based solutions, improved outcomes enabled through the innovations, and cost savings derived from deploying the technologies. That’s the top-line finding in the 2024 State of Digital Health Purchasing from the Peterson Health Technology Institute (PHTI).           PHTI surveyed 322 digital health decision makers working in employers, health plans, and health systems, fielding the study in July and August 2024.           3 in 4 purchasers grew spending on digital health technologies in the past two years,

Only 20% of U.S. adults have a positive view of the pharmaceutical industry, garnering the lowest positive vibes among Americans in Gallup’s latest survey on peoples’ opinions of industries in America. About 1 in 3 Americans feel positively about health care in the U.S., on par with publishing and the electric/gas industries — on the lower end of these findings.             By far, the top-perceived industry in the U.S. is agriculture and farming, taking the first spot with 64% of Americans’ positive views. Restaurants and the computer sector get 52% positives, although Gallup points out

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

“Voter registration in hospitals is the new frontier in health care.” That’s the headline in a WBUR story last week detailing the efforts of health care professionals in “amplifying” their patients’ voices inside and outside of the hospital walls by advocating for their health citizenship — through voter registration and public health policy advocacy.                  I’m a long-time evangelist for health citizenship and the role that a person’s engagement in the civic commons plays in one’s own health, the health of their communities and of the nation as a whole. I’m not alone

Women in the U.S. have lower life expectancy, greater risks of heart disease, and more likely to face medical bills and self-rationing due to costs, we learn in the latest look into Health Care for Women: How the U.S. Compares Internationally from The Commonwealth Fund.              The Fund identified four key conclusions in this global study: Mortality, shown in the first chart which illustrates women in the U.S. having the lowest life expectancy of 80 years versus women in other high-income countries; Health status, with women in the U.S. more likely to consume multiple prescription

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics had good news for American consumers long-facing inflation for household spending over the past couple of years, announcing on July 11, 2024, that the general consumer price index (CPI) fell, lowering real prices for people buying airline tickets, used cars and trucks, communication, and petrol to fill auto tanks.               That positive economic news did not extend to medical care and personal care, the BLS reported, whose costs increased by 3.3% and 3.2%, respectively. (Motor vehicle insurance costs grew a whopping 19.5% in the report, FYI). Following the