The Home Economics of Family and Fertility: Men’s Financial Views on Their Fertility Journeys (My Progyny Post #2)
Cost is a leading reason why people say they could not obtain the fertility care they need. But the costs of IVF and other forms of fertility care lie within a larger home economics framework of family-building and -raising. The context and costs of raising a child in America. Consider the layers of a household budget starting with the home’s “macro”-economics of income. Then within that circle, especially in the U.S., the factor of whether that household is covered by employer-sponsored health insurance. The next layer of more health micro-economics in the family is the
Where Health Meets Beauty, Mental Health, and Faith: Learning from the Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella
What is a pharmacy? And what are “medicines?” I’ve been thinking about this question for some time, and had the opportunity to consider this in real-time in a sort of back-to-the-past-to-the-future moment when I spent time at the glorious Farmaceutica of Santa Maria Novella (SMN) in Florence, Italy (in longhand, the “Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella)” on 8th November. This meet-up at this 800+ year old institution is one of many touchpoints in my work and personal life between late October and late November, where I’m working on health/care issues in 4 Euro cities: starting with London in week
A Chasm Between U.S. Health Citizens: Is Vaccination a Personal Choice, or for the Benefit of All?
One of the only uniting factors in U.S. health care across political parties is that most of the nation’s health citizens, cross-party ID, trust doctors and their professional associations for reliable information on vaccines. Pediatricians in particular are mostly-trusted for vaccine facts, according to the KFF Tracking Poll on Health Information and Trust: Tylenol-Autism Link and Vaccine Policies, the latest in the Kaiser Family Foundation’s series on Health Information and Trust Tracking Polls. The biggest trust-chasm when it comes to sources for vaccine information is Americans’ split views on Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary
Sleep in Our Lives: Self-Care, From Using PTO and Vacation Time to Tracking and Digital Detoxes
Sleep is a sort of luxury good when you don’t have it or get it: like water in a desert, it’s priceless and life-saving. When someone thinks of health, “sleep” falls into the top 3 factors, as measured by the Kearney Consumer Institute’s global survey conducted for the Consumer Goods Forum 2025. You can see from Kearney’s data shown here that physical activity (say, mobility and walking and moving about) ranks top for global health citizens, followed by diet and nutrition. Amerisleep, a sleep
Most MAGA Supporters Support Extending the Expiring ACA Tax Credits – Will That Move Negotiations to Re-Open the Government?
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 Emotional Drivers of Healthcare Discontent – Press Ganey Points to Access and Affordability Worries Driving Anxiety and Anger
In the current era of U.S. health citizen grievance with the health care system, people feel anxious, confused, and angry — especially when it comes to access and affordability of health care. We learn more about these emotional drivers of health/care grievance in Understanding Health Plan Member Discontent, an assessment of health consumers’ views of satisfaction across health insurance plan types (commercial, Medicaid, Medicare, and marketplace plans) and age of member, from the health consumer experience team at Press Ganey. Those three underlying factors driving discontent translate to different generations differently. Overall, anxiety relates to
In 10 Years, Health Care Will Happen Where Life Happens – PwC’s Tea Leaves into 2035
The costs of medical care are breaking the system, PwC asserts at the start of its new report on the $1 trillion opportunity to reinvent healthcare. The past 3 years of 8+% U.S. national health expenditure increases are “untenable,” PwC says, with 90% of that spending going toward patients with chronic and mental health conditions. What will transform the system and move us from “breaking point to breakthrough?” Biology and technology, PwC explains, with technology moving exponentially and simplifying care at scale, and biology decoding the “human operating system” enabling precision at scale. This
What the Growth of Single-Person-No Children SNAP Beneficiaries Means for Health in America
“SNAP has moved away from primarily serving families with children toward serving households without children, particularly those consisting of just one person,” an analysis from The Institute for Family Studies observes, giving us some food-for-thought on what these changing demographics of SNAP beneficiaries could mean for the health and well-being of people in the U.S. The Institute looked at data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and graphed this top-line trend of households with children declining as a percent of SNAP households compared with growth among households without children. SNAP has significant
Expect Double-Digit Prescription Drug Trend Increases in 2026 – The Update from HUB International
Prescription drug price trend for 2026 will be between 10% and 12% according to the 2026 Trend Study from HUB International, a global insurance and financial services firm. Here’s HUB’s line chart of the combined medical and Rx trend, illustrating nearly double trend growth since 2022 following the peak of 10.1% (combined) in 201 as patients returned to health care services and encounters when feeling safe in the fading out of the COVID-19 pandemic. That precipitous low-point in 2022 of 3.4% was the peak of the coronavirus stay-at-home period, representing the “medical distancing” felt across
On Labor Day 2025: From Health Care “Revenue Bounty Hunters,” Medical Bills Back into FICO Scores, the Rise of “Cute Debt,” and Tariffs — U.S. Consumers’ Face Eroding Financial Health
On this U.S. Labor Day 2025, the physical and the fiscal, with the mental, converge as I ponder what working Americans are facing….packing kids up for school, sorting out college payments and loans, dealing with rising costs of daily living, and feeling a growing pinch of what President Trump’s tariffs have had in store now that they’re hitting SKUs around the household. This post will cover most days this week as my own workflows will be heavy as clients return to face returns-to-work and updating scenario plans. We start this post with a headline: “Why Hospitals Are Hiring ‘Revenue Bounty
U.S. Physicians Have to Deal with the Growing Info-Demic of Disinformation Meant to Mislead Patients
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
Prescription Drug Pricing in America – a 3-Part Update, From the Over- the-Counter OPill and “Half-Price” Ozempic to Most-Favored-Nation Rx (Part 3)
Welcome to Part 2 of 3 in my consideration of Prescription Drug Pricing in America. You can catch up with yesterday’s Part 1 post here, and Part 2 here. The macro-context for these 3 posts are the forecasts for health care spending for the coming year. Health care cost increases forecasted for 2026 will, in significant part, be driven by prescription drug trend. This graphic from this week’s release of the Business Group on Health’s employer survey on healthcare cost growth to 2026 illustrates a key finding that’s echoed in other similar studies recently released and covered here in Health Populi.
Prescription Drug Pricing in America – a 3-Part Update, From the Over- the-Counter OPill and “Half-Price” Ozempic to Most-Favored-Nation Rx (Part 2)
“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
What U.S. Consumers Are Thinking About Tariffs’ Impacts on Health Care: Looking to Ipsos, QCentrix and Goldman Sachs
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
Women Walk a Financial Tightrope: What That Means for Women’s Health, Mind, Body, & Wallet
Financial stress and anxiety have an ‘outsized’ negative impact on the well-being of women in America, compared to male counterparts, we learn in Health. Wealth, and Happiness – Helping to overcome roadblocks to women’s well-being, a report from the Guardian Life Insurance Company. This report is part of Guardian’s annual research program called Mind, Body, Wallet, which the company launched 14 years ago. The goal of Mind, Body. Wallet is to assess how health citizens define “well-being” in daily living, making the crucial connections between mental health (“Mind”), physical health (“Body”), and money
Why a Grocery Store Signed On to “Make Health Tech Great Again”
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 Patient as Consumer – Updates from Fidelity on Retiree Health Care Costs ($172,500), Delaying Care, Tariff Impacts on Spending, and Roche Going DTPatient for Rx’s?
As of August 2025, U.S. patients of all demographics and geographies face many uncertainties with respect to their care. Issues such as health plan coverage, prescription drug costs, and access to services, among other challenges, continue to re-shape patients-as-health-consumers seeking transparency, clinical choices, and trust-worthy relationships with touchpoints in their personal health ecosystems. Four just-breaking stories across the health/care ecosystem illustrate several of these uncertainties and forces in U.S. health care — some adding friction and angst in a patient’s life, others perhaps providing some relief for certain health consumers. These news items address health care costs in retirement, the
How Taking Care of Our Pets Could Inspire Us to Care Better for Ourselves (and Each Other)
In a recent study which was part of the American Heart Association’s Healthy Bond for Life initiative, two-thirds of Americans told the AHA that they took better care of their pets than themselves. So with a lens on how to help inspire peoples’ self-care, I was keen to dive into research from Pet Partners Insurance (PPI), a pet health insurance provider, collaborating with the Human Animal Bond Research Institute (HABRI), to learn more about The Power of Pet Perks: How Pet-Inclusive Benefits Drive Employee Engagement, Retention, and Positive Workplace Culture. My interest
Most People Would Choose Food Over Meds to Get Healthy. But Barriers to Consumers Doing So Will Require Collaborative Approaches That Get Closer and Personal
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.”
Medical Cost Trend at 8.5% in 2026? PwC Sees “No End in Sight” for Increased Healthcare Spending
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
As Time Becomes More of a Luxury Thing, Consumers Ration Visits to Health Care Providers
When it comes to luxury goods, forget about that Rolex watch, a Louis Vuitton bag, or Porsche. The top luxury item among U.S. consumers in 2025 is time, and with many luxury goods, time is in short supply for most people. An important new report from Duckbill explores the Permission to Ask: Why Americans Need Help — And Why They Struggle to Get It. The top-line finding gleaned through Duckbill’s survey of 2.069 U.S. consumers in early May 2025 was that 2 in 3 Americans are just trying to get through the day. This struggle
National Health Spending in the U.S. in 2033: What 20.3% of the GDP Will Be Spent On
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
Consumers’ Favorite Brands for 2025 Look a Lot Like Pandemic Times: All About Hygiene, Safety, Personal Care, and Packages
Shades of the year 2020; it’s déjà vu all over again when it comes to consumers’ most trusted brands in 2025 featured in Morning Consult’s Most Reputable Brands report. Here’s the list of the top 25 most trusted brands across all consumer touch-points and industries for all adults, ages 18 and older. A quick calculation reveals that consumers most trust brands covering, Home keeping and hygiene – Dawn, Clorox, Lysol, Mr. Clean, Home Depot Self- and personal care – Dove, Oral-B, Kleenex, Colgate Health – BAND-AID, Tylenol Packages
That Big Beautiful Bill’s Healthcare Proposals Aren’t So Pretty in the Views of Most People in the U.S. – Including Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) – Listening to the Kaiser Family Foundation June Health Tracking Poll
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
Americans Hear More Frequently About GLP-1 Drugs Than About Menopause, Sleep, or Bird Flu
Yu In a sign of our health communications times, GLP-1s are a much more frequently health topic Americans hear about than autism and ADHD, cosmetic treatments like Botox, Bird flu, sleep issues, or menopause. The Pew Research Center polled 5,123 U.S. consumers in February and March 2025 to gauge peoples’ perspectives on health information and communications trends in America. In the study summary titled, From weight-loss drugs to raw milk, Americans hear more often about some health topics than others, the Pew Research team. The finding that
The Spirit for Eating Healthier Is Willing, But the Cost of Doing So “Outweighs” the Will – Listening to Escoffier
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,
Consumers’ Spending on Wellness and Retail Health is “Inelastic” — Think Food (and Food-As-Medicine)
Self-care is a growing thing as people face increasing health care costs, declining access for services and certain products (think: drug shortages and wait times for specialist physician consults), and increasing consumer competence in sourcing information on health care — whether through AI-assisted on-ramps or greater digital literacy in seeking and finding help online. McKinsey has tracked the expanding landscape and value of the global wellness market — and evolving consumer segments — in The $2 trillion global wellness market gets a millennial and Gen Z glow-up. I covered wellness
Consumers Are Keen to Invest in Health and Well-Being – But Show Them the Evidence
Consumers around the world feel more invested than ever in what makes people feel both well and prosperous, we learn in the NielsenIQ Global State of Health & Wellness 2025 survey report. But there’s a trust deficit that must be healed in order for a health consumer to invest in services and products that feed health and well-being. NIQ fielded the survey research online in January and February 2025 among nearly 19,000 adults living in 19 countries: Brazil, Canada, China, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, India, Indonesia Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, South Africa, Spain, Turkiye, UAE, United Kingdom, and
A Toyota RAV4 Hybrid, a Playground Set, or Healthcare for a Family of 4: What $35,119 Can Buy in 2025 According to Milliman
If you went shopping for something that cost $35,119 in 2025, which would you most value? A new 2025 Toyota RAV4 Hybrid with some extras on board? A Canyon BYO playground set for your yard, school, or social-athletic club? Or, Healthcare coverage for a family of 4 in the form of a PPO? Welcome to this year’s 20th anniversary edition of the Milliman Medical Index (MMI), which I’ve looked forward to reviewing for most of its two-decade history. [You can read my annual takes on the MMI here in Health Populi by searching “MMI” and the year of publication in
In Health Care, Consumers Are Seeking Kindness Coupled with Efficiency
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
Health, Wealth, and How Business Can Support Consumers in an Era of “Uncertainty on Steroids”
Facing uncertainties across everyday life flows, U.S. consumers look to economic and health security — and welcome businesses to support these, we learn in an analysis from The Conference Board. The Conference Board (TCB) polled 3,000 U.S. consumers gauging their perspectives on uncertainties emerging out of the new Trump administration’s policy changes introduced in the first quarter of 2025. The chart details people’s financial/fiscal responses in blue, and the health (mental, social, and physical aspects) in yellow: Consumers’ fiscal strategies for coping with uncertainty are to seek out more affordable brands and retailers, adjusting
If Food Is Medicine, Some Might Feel It’s a Luxury Good Like a Specialty Drug
Most people in the U.S. say it’s harder to eat healthy given the cost of “healthy food,” we learn in the report on Americans on Healthy Food and Eating from the Pew Research Center, published 7 May 2025. With a view that healthy food is “too expensive,” it may feel like aspiring for it feels like luxury-good shopping, or being a patient prescribed a specialty (high-cost) drug. The Pew team polled 5,123 U.S. adults’ perspectives on eating, fielded between 24 February and 2 March 2025. This report is timely as Secretary of Health and
Americans’ Trust in Public Health Agencies Has Become Politicized, Though There is Bipartisan Support for Many Public Health Priorities
While health citizens’ trust in the “messengers” of health information has become polarized by partisans’ political views, there is real concordance of support for many public health priorities. We weave together two current studies to come to this realization: the latest (April 2025) KFF Tracking Poll on Health Information and Trust, KFF’s ongoing health survey (published 6 May); and, the de Beaumont – Harvard Chan School of Public Health poll into Americans’ views on public health in “the first 100 days” of President Trump’s presidency. First, consider the KFF study, conducted among
How Consumers’ Economic Sentiments Are Shaping Peoples’ Financial and Emotional Well-Being (Spoiler: Not So Good): Learning from CivicScience
When it comes to health, the words “fiscal” and “physical” are morphing as peoples’ economic feelings (the “fiscal”) are shaping physical and emotional health, we find in U.S. consumer data presented by John Dick, Founder and CEO of CivicScience. The Consumer Technology Association convened a special session with John, who painted a portrait of the U.S. consumer at a point in time — late April 2025 — reminding us more than once during the hourlong session that, “Everything is constantly changing.” One certainty that we can be sure of, in the dismal-scientist way
A Profile of Health Consumer-Generations’ Use of Digital Health – Rock Health Takes Us Through the Ages
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
Health Insurance Coverage Among Smaller U.S. Businesses Is Eroding: A Signal From JPMorganChase
Working-age people in the U.S. depend on their employers to provide health insurance; just over one-half of people in America receive employer-sponsored health insurance. But a concerning signal has emerged that calls into question how sustainable the uniquely American employer-sponsored health plan model is: that is that one in 3 small businesses in the U.S. stopped covering health insurance after the worst of the pandemic health effects in 2023 as the companies payroll expenses continued to increase, a statistic raised in The consistency of health insurance coverage in small business: industry challenges and insights, a report from the JPMorganChase Institute
U.S. Health Care in 2025 Requires Scenario Planning: The Uncertainties (AI!?) That Inspire DIY Healthcare
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
Are We Liberated Yet? Tariffs Can Impact Financial Health (Riffing on MoneyLion’s Health Is Wealth Report)
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.
How BioPharma Can Improve Consumers’ Experience and Health
Patients as health consumers now know what “good” looks like in their digital experiences. People have tasted the convenience and respect they feel from well-designed, streamlined omnichannel retail experiences, and they now expect this from health care — specifically supported by the pharmaceutical companies who manufacture the medicines they use in managing chronic conditions, we learn in ixlayer ixInsights 2025: Pharma’s Role in Improving the Health Experience from ixlayer and Ipaos. The patient-focused report gets specific about people dealing with asthma, COPD, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, psoriasis, and atopic dermatitis with a lens on
What is a Consumer Health Company? Riffing Off of Deloitte’s Report on CHCs/A 2Q2025 Look at Self-Care Futures
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
Still Life in Need: Art, Food Justice, and Health
As Thomas Jefferson reminded us, travel makes us wiser…but less happy. And so it is when you confront a piece of art that makes you stop in your tracks, swim in it, and know what it’s saying in terms of what you know you know. Such was the case yesterday during a walking meeting through the Frist Art Museum in Nashville when I passed by this quilt, a multimedia work titled “Still Life in Need” by Lee Colvin, a local artist. This work was part of a
Art Collides with Health Policy: When “When Calls the Heart” Met MAHA This Week
Art reflects life — or in this case, bumps into life and health care — once again when the pop culture facet of my own media consumption converges with a news announcement where the timing of these events is just too uncanny. It never occurred to me I’d ever write about the Hallmark Channel in the Health Populi blog. But reading the news that President Trump’s administration plans to cut funding for the ongoing 30-year study into diabetes and pre-diabetes — the landmark National Diabetes Prevention Program (NDPP) — dovetailed (or perhaps more honestly stated, collided) with the plotline of
The Growth of DIY Digital Health – What’s Behind the Zeitgeist of Self-Reliance?
Most people in the U.S. use at least one medical device at home — likely a blood pressure monitor. used by nearly one-half of people based on a survey of 2,000 consumers conducted for Propel Software. The Propel study’s insights build on what we know is a growing ethos among health consumers seeking to take more control over their health care and the rising costs of medical bills and out-of-pocket expenses. That includes oral health and dental bills: 2 in 5 U.S. consumers use electric toothbrushes (a growing smart-device category at the
The Top Patient Safety Risks in 2025 Are Mostly About the “Human OS” – Reading ECRI’s Annual Report
Each year, ECRI (the ECRI Institute) publishes an annual report on the Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns for the year. The 2025 list was published today. My read of it is that most of these risks have to do with what I’ve been referring to as the Human OS, the Human Operating System, in my talks and teachings. In this post, I’ll focus on 2 of the 10 most top-of-mind in my current workflow with clients and speaking: #1 and #3. Here’s the list of 10, calling out: Risks of dismissing
Consumers Are Financially Stressed – What This Means for Health/Care in 2025
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
Think Quintuple Aim This Week at #HIMSS25
As HIMSS 2025, the largest annual conference on health information and innovation meets up in Las Vegas this week, we can peek into what’s on the organization’s CEO’s mind leading up to the meeting in this conversation between Hal Wolf, CEO of HIMSS, and Gil Bashe, Managing Director of FINN Partners. If you are unfamiliar with HIMSS, Hal explains in the discussion that HIMSS’s four focuses are digital health transformation, the deployment and utilization of AI as a tool, cybersecurity to protect peoples’ personal information and its use, and, workforce development. I have my own research agenda(s) underneath these themes
Improve Sleep, Improve the World and Health: ResMed’s Look at Global Sleep Trends
The world would be a better place if we had more, and better quality sleep. That’s the hopeful conclusion from the fifth annual Global Sleep Survey from ResMed. ResMed’s global reach with the sleeping public enabled the company to access the perspectives of over 30,000 respondents in 13 markets, finding that one in 3 people have trouble falling or staying asleep 3 or more times a week. We now live in “a world struggling with poor sleep” — “a world without rest,” ResMed coins our sleepless situation. The irony is that most people believe
Telehealth, Right Here, Right Now: Calling on Congress to Vote for America’s Health and Well-being
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
Health/Care at Super Bowl LIX, GLP-1s, Kaiser and Tufts on Food-As-Medicine, and the RFK, Jr. Factor: A Health Consumer Check-In
In the wake of the always-creative ads for Super Bowl and last Sunday’s LIX bout, game-watchers got to see a plethora of commercials dedicated to the annual event’s major features: food and game-day eating. Oh, and what’s turned out to be the most controversial commercial, the one on GLP-1s from Hims & Hers. In that vein, and converging with many news and policy events, I’m trend-weaving the latest insights into that most consumer-facing of the social determinants of health: food, and in particular, health consumers viewing and adopting food as part of their health and well-being moves. First, to the
Measuring Progress for Life Sciences: Trust, Patient Access, and Prevention at a Fork in the Road of Public Health
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
Trust and Grievance in 2025: The Edelman Trust Barometer on MLK Jr. Day Converging with the World Economic Forum Kick-Off and the Inauguration of the 47th U.S. President
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.
Connecting for Health at Home: A Unified Field Theory from #CES2025 (On Samsung, Withings, and Panasonic)
There were over 4,500 exhibitors on the show floor of the 2025 CES in Las Vegas last week, addressing every imaginable aspect of consumers’ daily lives as we increasingly coexist with technology to support life, liberty, and our personal pursuits of happiness….. ….and health. My focus is always on health, and in the past decade and a half, health/care, everywhere. So my lens on #CES2025 looked out for specific point solutions for health, medical care, fitness and well-being, along with adjacencies for mobility/auto, environmental health (think: clean air, clean water), kitchen appliances and food-tech, and home care (not the medical
Seeing Health/Care Everywhere at CES 2025: My Preview for #CES2025
Health/care is everywhere is the mantra on the back of my business card. And at #CES2025, that will indeed be the situation. The 2025 convening of CES (once known as the Consumer Electronics Show) in Las Vegas officially kicks off on 7 January 2025. But I’ll be there beginning 3rd January, scheduling pre-show meetings with innovators, analysts, and my own clients who will be attending the meeting. This will be my 15th year participating in CES, and marking over a decade as a member of the Consumer Technology Association (CTA). As someone who has tracked
The Rough Guide to Health/Care Consumers in 2025: The 2025 Health Populi TrendCast
At this year-end time each year, my gift to Health Populi readers is an annual “TrendCast,” weaving together key data and stories at the convergence of people, health care, and technology with a look into the next 1-3 years. If you don’t know my work and “me,” my lens is through health economics broadly defined: I use a slash mark between “health” and “care” because of this orientation, which goes well beyond traditional measurement of how health care spending is included in a nation’s gross domestic product (GDP); I consider health across the many dimensions important to people, addressing physical,
How Trauma-Informed Design Principles Can Be Health-Ful for All of Us – Learning from IKEA
As a long-time fan and customer of IKEA, I receive daily Google Alerts about the company, from business finances to design trends. When I read this piece on IKEA’s work on a home designed for people who were homeless, I paid special attention to learn about the concept of trauma-informed design. Thanks to the publication Retail TouchPoints and the author of the story, Adan Blair, for covering this project. The story has lit a lot of lightbulb inspirations for me in thinking through the role housing plays in human health and well-being, and also to
Digital Divides and Disability – Ranking Health Determinants in a Digital Age: Learning from WHO and LSE
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
Workers Feel “Stuck,” Under-Insured, Financially Stressed, and Neglecting Mental Health
“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
What Stays True for U.S. Health Care Post #Election2024 (1) – Consumers’ Dissatisfaction with Drug Prices
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
“People will seek wellness, peace and healing” – Reading the GWI Future of Wellness Report, 2024 Trends
Healthy eating and weight loss, personal care and beauty, exercise and physical activity, and wellness tourism are the four biggest components of the world’s wellness economy, quantified in The Future of Wellness, 2024 Trends, the perennial report from the Global Wellness Institute (GWI). Here’s the bubble chart, which I’ve updated with the 2025 data so we get a sense of what the coming year will bring for the eleven total segments that make up the global wellness market. The fine print of the projections for these areas identifies the annual growth rates for
Doctors’ Recommendations Are Top Motivators for Consumers Who Buy Digital Health Devices: Trust and Health
Most consumers using digital health devices felt more trust in the technology when coupled with doctors’ office reviews — another lens on the importance of trust-equity between patients and physicians. This insight came out of a report on How Consumers Purchase, Use and Trust Medical Devices based on market research sponsored by Propel Software. For the study, Propel Software engaged Talker Research to conduct a survey among 2,000 U.S. adults in October 2024 to gauge peoples’ views on digital health tools, buying trends, and trust. Start with the rate of 1 in 4 Americans’ experience
The Smart Home for Health, Brought to You by Samsung and Ashley
Today I am keynoting the OSF Digital Health Symposium in Peoria, IL, discussing The State(s) of Digital Health. A double-entendre intended, one of the states I’ll be discussing is the migration of acute care back to peoples’ homes, embedded with sensors, householders donning smart rings, and rooms fitted with Internet-of-Things for health and well-being. In this context, news that Samsung has begun to partner with Ashley, the national furniture dealer, struck me as interesting and important. I visited the Samsung Health House at CES 2024 last January: here is my write-up about what I
Peoples’ Lack of Trust in Science Extends to Views on Food and Nutrition
Only 2 in 5 people in the U.S. strongly trust science concerning food, nutrition, or diet, we learn from the 2024 IFIC Spotlight Survey: Americans’ Trust in Food & Nutrition Science, published in October. IFIC is the International Food Information Council, a non-profit organization with a mission of communicating science-based information about food safety, nutrition, and sustainable food systems. IFIC surveyed 1,000 U.S. adults online in July to gauge consumers’ views on food and science. The most-trusted sources of food information are the scientists involved in researching nutrition,
Americans Want More Health Care Issues Baked into the 2024 Elections – Gallup
Beyond women’s health and abortion politics, most Americans are looking for more health care baked into the 2024 Elections, based on a new poll from Gallup in collaboration with West Health. Two in three U.S. adults thought health care was not receiving enough attention during the 2024 Presidential campaign as of September 2024. This is a majority shared opinion for voters across the three party IDs in the U.S., shown in the first bar graph. The research polled 3,660 U.S. adults in September, about two-thirds before the presidential debate held September 10, and about one-third
1 in 2 U.S. Women (“The Bedrock of Society”) Self-Ration Care – the Latest Deloitte Findings
Women in the U.S. are more likely to avoid care than men in America, Deloitte found in the consulting firm’s latest survey on consumers and health care. Deloitte coins this phenomenon as a “triple-threat” that women face in the U.S. health care environment, the 3 “threats” being, Affordability, Access, and, Prior experience — that is the health disparity among women who have seen personal mis-diagnosis, bias, or treatment that hasn’t been consistent with current protocols and practices. The data come out of Deloitte’s fielding of the U.S. consumer survey in February and March, 2024.
Obesity is a Public Health Epidemic in the U.S. — The Case for GLP-1 Coverage, Affordability and Equity
“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
What the “Vibe-Cession” Means for Health Care in the U.S. – Spending is Personal
People living in the U.S. continue to feel a “vibe-cession” malaise, based on the American Mindset July 2024 update from Dentsu’s Consumer Navigator research. Notwithstanding generally good news about the American macroeconomy — in terms of growth, downward ticking inflation, and expected interest rate relief come September from the Federal Reserve — one in two Americans still thinks the country is in a recession. And this context is important for consumer’s personal spending on health care, fitness, and wellness, because, as Dentsu puts it, “consumers think in terms of personal finances.” As
Consumers Demand Foods That Are Healthy AND Delicious – and Some Health Equity Implications
The most common food-eating styles practiced by U.S. consumers are low sugar/diabetic diets, low-calorie, dairy-free, anti-inflammatory, and gluten-free, ccording to the Midyear Trends update from Datassential. In their update on the food trends entering the second half of 2024, Datassential offered several insights on consumers and food-as-medicine in a section called the Health Check-Up. These trends are shaping consumers’ food demands in both their grocery shopping preferences (for food consumed in the home) as well as their eating-out ordering strategies — where 35% of consumers want to see menu offerings with foods that are
Older Americans Mostly Receptive to Apps for Health, but Chronically Ill People Could Use a Nudge (and a Payer)
AARP found that 7 in 10 people ages 50+ are “app-receptive” for health and wellness apps in Unlocking Health and Wellness Apps: Experiences of Adults Age 50-Plus, a summary of research conducted with U.S. consumers 50 and over from AARP. The methodology for this study included only older consumers who were comfortable in downloading apps to smartphones or tablets, and were willing to do so — whom AARP considered the target audience for this research. In addition, the respondents surveyed were also at least interested in trying apps designed for health and wellness, thus dubbed “health
Trust in Institutions Among Americans: Small Biz, the Military and Police More than the Medical System
Two-thirds of Americans have a lot of confidence in small business in the U.S. In second place, 61% of people in the U.S. have confidence in the military, followed by 51% with the police. The Gallup Poll on Americans’ confidence in 17 U.S. institutions is out today, reflecting a snapshot of U.S. adults’ views on the organizations that touch their daily lives. And health care doesn’t fare too well in this latest read. Only 36% of Americans have confidence in the U.S. medical system, tied with peoples’ feelings of lack of confidence
Medical Debt, Aflac on Eroding Health Benefits, the CBO’s Uninsured Forecast & Who Pays for Rising Health Care Prices: A Health Consumer Financial Update
On June 11, Rohit Chopra, the Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced the agency’s vision to ban Americans’ medical debt from credit reports. He called out that, “In recent years, however, medical bills became the most common collection item on credit reports. Research from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2022 showed that medical collections tradelines appeared on 43 million credit reports, and that 58 percent of bills that were in collections and on people’s credit records were medical bills.” Chopra further explained that medical debt on a consumer credit report was quite different than other kinds
Most Americans Follow an Eating Pattern in Search of Energy, Protein, and Well-Being – With Growing Financial Stress: A Food as Medicine Update
Most Americans follow some kind of eating regime, seeking energy, more protein, and healthy aging, according to the annual 2024 Food & Health Survey published this week by the International Food Information Council (IFIC). But a person’s household finances play a direct role in their ability to balance healthful food purchases and healthy eating, IFIC learned. In this 19th annual fielding of this research, IFIC explored 3,000 U.S. consumers’ perspectives on diet and nutrition, trusted sources for food information, and new insights into peoples’ views on the GLP-1 weight-loss drugs and the growing sense
The Most Trusted Brands of 2024 Tell Us A Lot About Health Consumers
From bandages to home hygiene, OTC pain meds and DIY home projects, Morning Consult’s look into the most-trusted brands of 2024 give us insights into health consumers. I’ve been tracking this study since before the public health crisis of the coronavirus, and it always offers us a practical snapshot of the U.S. consumer’s current ethos on trusted companies helping people risk-manage daily living — and of course, find joy and satisfaction as well. In the top 15, we find self-care for health and well-being in many brands and products: we can call out Band-Aid, Dove, Colgate, Kleenex, and Tylenol. For
A 2025 Subaru Forester, a Year at U-New Mexico, or a Health Plan for a Family of Four: the 2024 Milliman Medical Index
Health care costs for an “average” person covered by an employer-sponsored PPO in the U.S. rose 6.7% between 2023 and 2024, according to the 2024 Milliman Medical Index. Milliman also calculated that the largest driver of cost increase in health care, accounting for nearly one-half of medical cost increases, was pharmacy, the cost of prescription drugs, which grew 13% in the year. The big number this year is $32,066, which is the cost of that employer-sponsored PPO for a family of 4 in 2024. I’ve curated the chart of the MMI statistic for many
GLP-1s’ direct and indirect impacts on health care and consumer goods – Jane speaks with Bloomberg BNN
Today, I spoke live with Paul Bagnell, news anchor with Bloomberg BNN, on the topic of the GLP-1 agonists and their impact on health care, industries beyond health and medicine, and consumers. In this post, I’ll share with you some of the plotline for our discussion. Gallup polled U.S. adults in March to gauge their experience with injectable weight loss drugs, the results published earlier this week. The first chart tells us that 6% of people have used these drugs, and 3% were doing so in March. Consumers using the meds were more
A Tax on Moms’ Financial and Physical Health – The 2024 Women’s Wellness Index
“Motherhood is the exquisite inconvenience of being another person’s everything” is a quote I turn to when I think about my own Mom and the remarkable women in my life raising children. With Mother’s Day soon approaching, the 2024 Women’s Wellness Index reminds us that the act of “being another person’s everything” has its cost. The Index, sponsored by PYMNTS in collaboration with CareCredit, was built on survey responses from 10,045 U.S. consumers fielded in November-December 2023. The study gauged women’s perspectives on finances, family, social life impacts on health and well-being. My key takeaway from
Leveraging Trust, Showing Humility: How Health Care Organizations Can Serve Consumers – A New Read from McKinsey
Three trends underpin health consumers’ evolving demands for service: spending more but getting less satisfaction and innovation; trusting health care with data but underwhelmed by the use of that personal information; and, growing “shopping” behavior seeking quality, availability, proximity, cost, and options across channels for health care. That’s the current read from McKinsey & Company’s team noting that Consumers rule: Driving healthcare growth with a consumer-led strategy. In this health consumer update, McKinsey spoke with three consumer marketing experts from other industries to learn best practices on how best to “be there”
Considering Equity and Consumer Impacts of GLP-1 Drugs – A UBS Economist Weighs In
Since the introduction of GLP-1 drugs on the market, their use has split into two categories: for obesity and “recreationally,” according to the Chief Economist with UBS (formerly known as Union Bank of Switzerland). Paul Donovan, said economist, discusses The economics of getting thin in his regularly published comment blog. “These different uses have different economic consequences,” Donovan explains: Obese patients who use GLP-1s should become more productive employees, Donovan expects — less subject to prejudice, and less likely to be absent from work. While so-called recreational GLP-1 consumers may experience these
The Women’s Health Gap Is Especially Wide During Her Working Years – Learning from McKinsey, the World Economic Forum, and AARP in Women’s History Month
There’s a gender-health gap that hits women particularly hard when she is of working age — negatively impacting her own physical and financial health, along with that of the community and nation in which she lives. March being Women’s History Month, we’ve got a treasure-trove of reports to review — including several focusing on health. I’ll dive into two for this post, to focus in on the women’s health gap that’s especially wide during her working years. The reports cover research from the McKinsey Health Institute collaborating with the World Economic Forum on
Americans Come Together in Worries About Medical Bills, the Cost of Health Care, and Prescription Drug Costs
In the U.S., national news media, Federal statistics, dozens of business leaders and the Federal Reserve Bank have been talking about an historically positive American economy on a macro level. But among individual residents of the U.S., there is still a negative feeling about the economy in a personal context, revealed in the Kaiser Family Foundation Health Tracking Poll for February 2024. I’ve selected three figures of data from the KFF’s Poll which make the point that in peoples’ negative feelings about the national economy, their personal feelings about medical costs rank high
People With Medical Debt Are Much More Likely to Be in Financial Distress in America
How financially vulnerable are people with medical debt in the U.S.? Significantly more, statistically speaking, we learn from the latest survey data revealed by the National Financial Capabilities Study (NFCS) from the FINRA Foundation. The Kaiser Family Foundation and Peterson Center on Healthcare analyzed the NFCS data through a consumer health care financial lens with a focus on medical debt. Financial distress takes many forms, the first chart inventories. People with medical debt were most likely lack saving for a “rainy day” fund, feel they’re “just getting by” financially, feel their finances control their life, and
The Wellness Market Shaped by Health at Home, Wearable Tech, and Clinical Evidence – Thinking McKinsey and Target
Target announced that the retail chain would grow its aisles of wellness-oriented products by at least 1,000 SKUs. The products will span the store’s large footprint, going beyond health and beauty reaching into fashion, food, home hygiene and fitness. The title of the company’s press release about the program also included the fact that many of the products would be priced as low as $1.99. So financial wellness is also baked into the Target strategy. Globally, the wellness market is valued at a whopping $1.8 trillion according to a report published last week by McKinsey. McKinsey points to five trends
A Tale of Two Houses: House Calls at #CES2024 with Amazon and AARP + Samsung
The growing movement of health care to the home is evident by a growing list of point solutions featured at CES 2024. Digital health has been a fast-growing category of consumer-facing devices at CES for over a decade. But with the growing ubiquity of connectivity, cloud computing, sensors and this year AI “everywhere,” a person’s home as their health-hub is an increasingly practical scenario. I track many categories of products at CES each year, and this year added into my portfolio the smart kitchen and smart bathroom. We’ve had components of these two
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
In 2024 U.S. Consumers Will Mash Financial Resolutions With Those For Physical Health and Mental Health, Fidelity Finds
One-third of U.S. consumers feel in worse financial shape now than in 2022, with inflation a top concern, discovered in the 2024 New Year’s Financial Resolutions Study from Fidelity Investments. In this 15th annual update of Fidelity’s research into Americans’ New Year’s resolutions for financial health, we learn the mantra that 2024 will be the year of living practically, opening new chapters for saving and paying down debt. Fidelity conducted an online poll among 3,002 U.S. adults 18 and over in October 2023 to gauge peoples’ perspectives on personal finances, and well-being currently and into 2024. This
Healthcare Bills, Affordability, and Self-Rationing Care Will Continue to Challenge U.S. Health Consumers in 2024
Two-thirds of U.S. consumers say they can’t afford to pay their medical bills on-time, based on the 2023 Consumer Survey from Access One, a financial services company focused on healthcare payments. The report’s title page asks the question, “What options do consumers really want for paying healthcare expenses?” The survey report responds to that question, finding out that nearly one-half of patients have taken some kind of action to reduce their medical expenses. Furthermore, one-third of consumers are not confident they could pay a medical bill of $500 or more. Access One fielded
“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
How Ahold-Delhaize Connects the Grocery, Climate Change, ESG and Consumers’ Health
In the food sector, “the opportunity for us and the role that we play is to connect climate and health,” Daniella Vega of Ahold Delhaize told Valerio Baselli during the Morningstar Sustainable Investing Summit 2023. In a conversation discussing the importance of non-financial metrics in companies’ ESG efforts, Vega connected the dots between climate change, retail grocery, and consumers’ health and well-being. Vega is the Global Senior Vice President, Health & Sustainability, with Ahold Delhaize— one of the largest food retail companies in the world. Based in the Netherlands, the company operates mainly in
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
What Walmart’s Look at Ozempic Users Tells Us About Health/Care Consumers
“We definitely do see a slight change compared to the total population, we do see a slight pullback in overall basket,” the CEO of Walmart US is quoted in Bloomberg. “Just less units, slightly less calories.” With patients’ use GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro fast-rising in the pharmacy market, so are the concerns of companies that stock the-middle-of-the-grocery-store aisles for processed foods like sweet and salty snacks. As the prospects for the drug companies who manufacture prescription drugs made for patients managing diabetes and obesity are on the
Food-As-Medicine Grows Its Cred Across the Health/Care and Retail Ecosystem
In the nation’s search for spending smarter on health care, the U.S. could save at least $13 billion a year through deploying medically-tailored meals for people enrolled in Medicare, Medicaid, and private insurance programs, according to the True Cost of Food, research published by the Tufts School of Nutrition Science and Policy collaborating with The Rockefeller Foundation. It’s been one year since the White House convened the Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health, kicking off the Biden Administration’s national strategy to improve health citizens’ access to healthy food as a matter of public health and economic security.
The 2023 Health Economy – The Evolving Primary Care and Retail Health Convergence Through Trilliant Health’s Lens
In U.S. health care’s negative-sum game, stakeholders who survive and win that game will have to deliver value-for-money, we learn from Trilliant Health’s 2023 Trends Shaping the Health Economy Report. “Report” is one word for this nearly 150-page compendium of health care data that is an encyclopedic treasure trove for health service researchers, marketers, strategists, journalists, and those keen to explore questions about the current state of health care in America. As Sanjula Jain points out in the Report’s press release, the publication resembles another huge report many of us appreciated for
The Healthcare Financial Experience is a Stressful One: the Convergence of our Medical, Retail, and Financial Lives
One in two consumers in the U.S. feel their well-being or healing was negatively impacted by difficulty paying for their medical care. Welcome to the convergence of patients’ health care life with financial and retail lives, we learn from the 2024 Healthcare Financial Experience Study from Cedar. And that patient’s positive clinical experience can absolutely reverse the consumer’s perception of the provider, noted by this quote from OSU’s Chief Financial Officer Vincent Tammaro: “We’ve cured you of your ailment, but we’ve harmed you financially.” That’s a form of financial toxicity that
GNC Offers “Free Healthcare” — Telehealth, Generic Meds, and Loyalty in the Retail Health Ecosystem
The retail health landscape continues to grow, now with GNC Health offering a new program featuring telehealth and “curated set” of 40+ generic prescription drugs commonly used in urgent care settings. The services are available to members of GNC’s new-and-improved loyalty program, GNC PRO Access, which is priced at a fixed fee of $39.99 for one year’s membership. This is available to consumers 18 years of age and older. “As a trusted brand in the health and wellness space, we are thrilled to expand our efforts in helping our customers Live Well by offering
There’s a New “O” in Medicine-Town – Welcome OPill to the Front of the Counter
You may not be able to get that ear-worm jingle that goes “O O O Ozempic” out of your musical mind, but I’m happy to tell you there’s a new “O” in town: the Opill. Welcome to the first OTC contraceptive for sale in the USA. I wrote about Perrigo’s Opill here in Health Populi in May 2023 as a “signpost on the road to retail health.” It’s official: “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Opill®, a progestin-only daily oral contraceptive, for over-the-counter (OTC) use for all ages.
Patients-As-Health Care Payers Define What a Digital Front Door Looks Like
In health care, one of the “gifts” inspired by the coronavirus pandemic was the industry’s fast-pivot and adoption of digital health tools — especially telehealth and more generally the so-called “digital front doors” enabling patients to access medical services and personal work-flows for their care. Two years later, Experian provides a look into The State of Patient Access: 2023. You may know the name Experian as one of the largest credit rating agencies for consumer finance in the U.S. You may not know that the company has a significant footprint
Consumers and Cancer: 3 Patient-Focused Charts From IQVIA on the State of the Oncology in 2023 – and Introducing CancerX
It’s time for the annual ASCO conference, currently convening the American Society for Clinical Oncology in Chicago. Starting 2nd June, there have been dozens of positive announcements updating research and therapies bringing hope to the 2 million new patients who will be diagnosed with cancer in the U.S. in 2023, and millions of more people worldwide. Just in time for #ASCO2023, the IQVIA Institute published their annual report on Global Oncology Trends 2023 – Outlook to 2027, an update featuring pipelines, therapy approvals, research updates, costs of oncology products, and patients.
Searching for Health/Care Touchpoints in the 2023 Axios Harris Poll 100
Patagonia, Costco, John Deere, and Trader Joe’s are loved; Twitter, Fox Corp., FTX and The Trump Organization? Not so much. Welcome to 2023 Axios Harris Poll 100 list of companies U.S. consumers rate from excellent in terms of reputation to very poor and, one in particular, “critical.” Exploring the list, we can find insights into consumers’ preferred touchpoints for health, health care, and well-being curated in their daily lives. In this, today’s, Health Populi blog, I consider The 2023 Axios Harris Poll 100 reputation rankings in light of what we learned from the Morning Consult Most Trusted Brands 2023 study
What $31,065 Can Buy You: a Toyota Corolla Cross Hybrid, a Year at Gnomon School, or Healthcare for a Family of 4 in America
“Healthcare costs came roaring back in 2021” after falling in 2020. In 2023, that roaring growth in health care costs continues with expected growth of 5.6%. For 2023, you could take your $31K+ and buy a Toyota Corolla Cross Hybrid auto, fund a year at the Gnomon School in Hollywood toward a degree in animation or game design, or buy healthcare for your family of 4. Welcome to this year’s annual look at health care costs for a “typical” U.S. family explained in the 2023 Milliman Medical Index (MMI).
Band-Aid® Rules: Health is Baked Into The Most Trusted Brands in 2023 In Retail, Beauty, and Non-Profits
The ten most trusted brands in the U.S. have to do with health, well-being, and hygiene in everyday life — from convenient package delivery to financial health, mindful self-care, and taking care of our kids’ boo-boos. Welcome to this year’s portfolio of the Most Trusted Brands 2023, a special report from Morning Consult that, annually, paints a picture of what everyday life for everyday people is about. For the second year in a row, Band-Aid® brand bandages ranked top of all brands assessed among U.S. consumers from data gathered in March-April 2023. Net trust in this study
The Growing Pet Economy – What It Means for Human Health, Well-Being, and Healthcare Costs
Our pets can be personal and family drivers of health and health care cost savings, according to a new study from according to a new report from researchers at George Mason University published in their paper, Health Care Cost Savings of Pet Ownership. Reviewing this new paper inspired me to explore the current state of the pet/health market and implications for their human families, my weaving of various stories explored in this Health Populi blog post. Some of the key signposts we’ll cover are: The report on pet ownership driving owners’ health care cost savings A new market analysis of
Hackathons are intense, fast-paced events where interdisciplinary teams come together to solve complex problems. In this SEE YOU NOW Insight from Episode 46: What The Hack? I collaborated with inspiring nurse innovator Rebecca Love to discuss why it's critical to bring nurses into the hackathon mix to address some of the most pressing problems in healthcare.
I'm once again pretty gobsmackingly happy to have been named a judge for the 2026 CES Innovation Awards, focusing on digital health, longevity, and fitness. Preceding every year's global conference, CES receives hundreds of applications from innovators around the world building tech-based solutions to big challenges. So glad to be part of this annual initiative to see what global health-tech pioneers are cooking up to address and scale the health and well-being of fellow health citizens, globally.
You can see the results of the Digital Health Awardees here on the #CES2026 website.
Stay tuned to Health Populi in early January as I'll be attending Media Days and meeting with innovators in digital health, longevity, and the home-for-health during CES 2026 in Las Vegas. I'll be at the conference for an entire week meeting with clients and exhibitors at the biggest-meeting-of-the-year on consumer-facing technology. I'll be reporting daily from Vegas here in the blog, sharing with you insights about the latest breakthroughs, products, and services that enable people to manage health, well-being, and medical issues in their own hands and homes.