A blog covering the health/care ecosystem and people.

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

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

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,

With women’s health and femtech investing in the spotlight in 2025, most of the focus has been on either women’s access to health care services (e.g., for abortion and prenatal/primary care) to start-ups focusing on fertility technology and benefits, along with growing awareness of the long-overlooked menopause market opportunity. Contraception? Not so visible. Of course, we welcomed the Opill to the over-the-counter medicines market last year with FDA approval of the switch to retail pharmacy and vending machine access.                     Now let me point you to a newfangled marketing campaign for

One in three Americans could imagine leaving America for good as expatriates — with access to affordable and reliable health insurance the top consideration, according to research conducted by the Harris Poll on behalf of GeoBlue and International Citizens Insurance (ICI). “Thirty-one percent of potential expats cite concerns about healthcare coverage abroad being the reason they haven’t yet taken the leap to move abroad. This trumped concerns about their work and social life abroad,” the survey found.             Earlier this year, The Harris Poll’s American Expats Survey, published in February 2025, found that health care accessibility

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

The role of loneliness and social isolation plays into every aspect of human health, beyond mental and behavioral impacts: loneliness is a risk factor for overall health status and well-being, as well as a barrier to medication adherence, we learn in Loneliness and Health Behaviors: A Missing Link in Chronic Care from Pleio. Pleio launched the report at the Assembia AXS25 Conference in Las Vegas yesterday, Pleio surveyed 2,008 U.S. adults in March 2025 living with at least one chronic condition to gauge patients’ perspectives on loneliness, health outcomes, and peoples’ adherence to prescribed medicines.            

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

McKinsey just published a detailed report into Sporting Goods 2025, which the firm calls a “new balancing act” that must turn uncertainty into opportunity.               The report is based on five key observations: Only a few sporting goods companies have expanded growth and margins since 2018 — and must “rethink the value chain” in the face of challenging geopolitical headwinds One-half of so-called “active consumers” say that fitness is a core element of their identity, with emotional connections to brands they purchase for the lifestyle Incumbent sporting goods companies are losing market share to

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

Tom Lawry may be best-known as a leading voice on AI in health care; after all, he’s written two very well-selling books on the topic, speaks all over the world on the subject, and in his most recent company-based gig helped lead Microsoft’s efforts in AI in health care and life sciences. When his publisher asked him to write a third book on AI in health care – still a hot topic in publishing – Tom said he’d rather turn to a subject long on his mind: the state of health care in America and how to change the conversation

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

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

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

The nature of retail pharmacy is changing, with both threats and opportunities re-shaping the business itself, and the pharmacy’s role in the larger health/care ecosystem. To keep sharp on the topics, I attended Rx Market Insights: Performance Trends and Outlook for 2025, a data-rich session presented on February 18 by IQVIA and sponsored by Ascend Laboratories. The webinar was hosted by DSN (Drug Store News), appropriately so because the action-packed hour went into detail providing the current state of prescription drugs and the pharmacy in America. Doug Long, IQVIA’s VP of Industry Relations, and Scott Biggs, the company’s Director of Supplier

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

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

CES 2025: as you read the acronym and year, your brain registered an image like consumer technology and the start of a new year, or some variation of those thoughts. When you saw the title of this post with the acronym “GLP-1,” your brain might not have connected the dots between a medicine and “CE,” consumer electronics. But here we are in real-time, in real life, at the convergence of pharmaceuticals and medicines and consumer-facing technology. And keep in mind that we’re at the annual meeting of CES which is convened by the Consumer Technology Association, CTA. GLP-1s are showing

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,

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

In our home, we’re feeling very grateful for our healthy lives and work-flows right now, being very mindful about seeing blessings around me and within me…. So I’m sharing the love (or “scaling the love” as I recently coined at OSF’s Digital Health Symposium!) to honor American Thanksgiving 2024 here in Health Populi pointing out several sources highlighting the evidence on gratitude and health….underpinned with love, the ultimate driver of health and well-being.           Leslie Sarasin, President and CEO of FMI, the Food Industry Association, reminds us that, “Our immigrant ancestors, the pilgrim settlers, worked hard

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

As the annual HLTH conference convenes this week in Las Vegas, numerous reports have been published to coincide with the meeting updating various aspects of technology, health care, providers and patients. In this post, I’m weaving together several of the papers that speak to the intersection of health care, consumers, and technology – the sweet spot here on Health Populi. I hope to provide attendees of HLTH 2024 along with my readers who aren’t in Vegas useful context for assessing the new ideas and business model announcements as well as a practical summary for those of you in planning mode for

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

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,

Lululemon has published the 2024 Global Well-Being Report, a study into peoples’ perspectives on their personal health from the company best known for athleisure wear and self-care. This year’s report is titled, The Pressure to Be Well. That pressure is coming from peoples’ experiencing “well-being burnout.” In the company’s fourth annual report on well-being, Lululemon learned that most people have tried to adopt personal strategies to bolster their health, and one-half of these folks are confronting “well-being burnout.” Lululemon collaborated with Edelman Data & Intelligence to field the study in April and May 2024 in 15 markets where the company

I’m off to Florence, Italy, soon, where about 10 years ago I happened upon a vending machine sited outside of a pharmacy just a few blocks from the Duomo — the Farmacia Della Condotta. And in that vending machine, accessible at all hours (especially overnight when the pharmacy was closed), were all manners of direct-to-consumer self-care goods….including condoms. What distinguished this from other vending machines that might have channeled condoms at the time was that those tended to be located in men’s rooms in, say, bars — not openly on a city street. You can see the Italian vending machine

“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

With 70 different clinical trials for GLP-1 drugs in process with the FDA, payers — and other stakeholders in the health care ecosystem — have the semaglutide-SENSE top of mind, based on my ongoing updating of this fast-moving market space.               For overall market context on pace-of-growth in adoption, check out this chart from a JAMA Health Forum research letter on Prescription Fills for Semaglutide Products by Payment Method, published August 2nd. The study was based on the IQVIA National Prescription Audit PayerTrak data which captures 92% of Rx’s filled at retail pharmacies in

Globally, patients are growing consumer muscles leaning into trust that’s building on communications that connect with them, based on insightful research from Smart Communications. This consumer research was fielded by Toluna and Harris Interactive in February and March 2024.                     In The State of Customer Conversations, the report assesses input from global consumers from the APAC region (Australia, New Zealand, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, and Singapore), German-speaking markets (Austria, Germany, Switzerland), the United Kingdom, and the U.S. The research revealed five key findings, shown in the first exhibit: Communications are increasingly important

“’A reform,’ wrote a 19th-century British parliamentarian, ‘is a correction of abuses. A revolution is a transfer of power. As we celebrate the American Revolution, catalyzed by men who broke ranks with their peers to overthrow a power structure that seemed immutable, let’s also celebrate those physicians who broke with their peers and declared independence for American patients.”                  So begins an informative, timely essay on participatory medicine and patient engagement researched and beautifully written by Michael Millenson, whom I am blessed to call both dear friend and professional colleague. Michael’s essay on the

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

If people’s feelings about AI were a Wall Street market, we’d find both bulls and bears, simultaneously, viewing AI’s role in health care. We can see this from many consumer surveys published in the past year about the growing role and adoption of AI in health care, and some wariness found in a new study from Deloitte on Building and maintaining health care consumers’ trust in generative AI.                 Here’s the top-line from the Deloitte team, with particular growth in the question of trusting the information forming the AI for health or wellness related

“The greatest opportunity offered by AI is not reducing errors or workloads, or even curing cancer: it is the opportunity to restore the precious and time-honored connection and trust,” Dr. Eric Topol wrote in his 2019 book, Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again. In the five years since Dr. Topol looked for AI to bolster the human-touch in health care, we’ve lived, worked, and muddled our way through the COVID-19 pandemic and witnessed the growing epidemic of burnout among clinicians, the front-line of medical care. I recalled Dr. Topol’s assertion on AI’s promise for humanizing health

“If data is everywhere, how do you protect it?”  This thought has been on my mind well before the Change Healthcare hacks (that’s plural) with which U.S. health care stakeholders are still dealing as this post goes live on the Health Populi blog. It’s a question posed to me in conversation with Richard Kaufmann, Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) with Amedisys. I’m grateful for the opportunity to explore in depth the many facets of cybersecurity in health care  with Richard – the growing threats, the impact on providers, the state of technology and innovations to manage risks, and his evolving

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”

This post follows up Part 1 of a two-part series I’ve prepared in advance of the AHIP 2024 conference where I’ll be brainstorming these scenarios with a panel of folks who know their stuff in technology, health care and hospital systems, retail health, and pharmacy, among other key issues. Now, let’s dive into the four alternative futures built off of our two driving forces we discussed in Part 1.             The stories: 4 future health care worlds for 2030 My goal for this post and for the AHIP panel is to brainstorm what the person’s

Whether you’re a patient or a physician in the U.S., you’re burned out, tapped out, stressed out, timed out. While the 118th U.S. Congress can’t agree on much before the 2024 summer recess, there’s one bipartisan stroke of political pens in Washington, DC, that could provide some satisfaction for both patients and doctors: bring telehealth back to patients and providers permanently. Those pens would do two things to modernize American health care for both patients and doctors: first, Congress would pass the CONNECT for Health Act (HR 4189. S 2016) and second, re-introduce and sign the Telehealth Modernization Act.   

Three major milestones marked March 2024 which compel us to note the growing role of patients-as-consumers — especially for self-prescribing medicines and medical devices. This wave of self-prescribed healthcare is characterized by three innovations: the Opill, GLP-1 receptor agonists, and Dexcom’s Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM) system that’s now available without a prescription. Together, these products reflect a shift in health care empowerment toward patients as consumers with greater autonomy over their health care when the products and services are accessible, affordable, and designed with the end-user central to the value proposition and care flows. Let’s take a look at each

Three in four people in the U.S. have used virtual care, now, “Table-stakes…here to stay for patients and providers. However, that ubiquity comes with its own set of market pressures…shifting from pandemic-responsiveness to market- and consumer- responsiveness,” according to The new era of consumer engagement, Rock Health’s ninth annual Consumer Adoption Survey published 18 March.            Convenience and waiting time are the top two reasons for choosing virtual over in-person care, Rock Health found. While virtual care is ubiquitous across the U.S. health care delivery landscape, patients-as-health care consumers are becoming more savvy and discriminating based

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

A “rebel” is both a noun and a verb. As a noun, Merriam-Webster tells us that a rebel is a person who opposes or takes up arms against a government or a ruler. As a verb, “to rebel” is to oppose or disobey one in authority or control, or otherwise renounce and resist by force the authority of one’s government.” An additional definition of the verb is, “to feel or exhibit anger or revulsion.” If you’ve been a patient facing a diagnosis of an illness, whether rare or common, you may well have felt these various feelings stirring inside your self.

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