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

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

 

Hospital at Home: Prospects and Challenges, and Learnings from Best Buy Health

With the urgent need to identify more efficient and lower-cost health care delivery models, we look to growing evidence for digital health technologies that support the Hospital at Home (HaH) model, considered in a new review article published in late February in npj Digital Medicine, The hospital at home in the USA: current status and future prospects. Clinicians from Scripps Research and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine collaborated on this work, calling out the relatively fast adoption of HaH programs during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. In some parts of the world, such as Australia and Norway, “in-person at-home

 

A Health Consumer Bill of Rights: Assuring Affordability, Access, Autonomy, and Equity

Let’s put “health” back into the U.S. health care system. That’s the mantra coming out of this week’s annual Capitol Conference convened by the National Association of Benefits and Insurance Professionals (NABIP). (FYI you might know of NABIP by its former acronym, NAHU, the National Association of Health Underwriters).         NABIP, whose members represent professionals in the health insurance benefits industry, drafted and adopted a new American Healthcare Consumer Bill of Rights launched at the meeting. While the digital health stakeholder community is convening this week at VIVE in Los Angeles to share innovations in health tech, NABIP

 

Rebel Health: The Personal and Professional Passion of Susannah Fox

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

 

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

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

 

HeartMates, Bringing Community and Heart Health Love from Damar Hamlin – Abbott at #CES2024

The heart is a major health-category at CES 2024, from wristband wearable tech to remote health monitoring devices enabling cardiovascular hospital-to-home care. Abbott, one of the first life science companies to exhibit at CES back in 2022, announced the HeartMates program here at #CES2024 today as part of a panel titled Ahead of the Game: Revolutionizing Athlete Safety with Emerging Health Tech. I have both professional and personal interests in athlete safety, having two nephews who have been involved in acute sports injury and brain health. The panel discussion featured the latest research findings on injury prevention and recovery, with

 

Access to Technology Is the New Pillar for Well-Being: CES & the UN Partner for Human Security for All

In kicking off #CES2024, CTA’s researchers noted the acceleration of global connectivity, with gaps in peoples’ ability to connect depending where they live: by region, the percent of people connected to the internet today are, according to CTA’s data, 92% in the U.S. 87% in the E.U. 76% in Latin America 73% in China 55% in Nigeria 46% in India. Such gaps in connectivity threaten peoples’ individual well-being, but also social and political stability that impacts the entire world’s security. And not to overlook, as well, the promise of AI to do good at scale at the enterprise-level, globally.  

 

Technology Is Playing a Growing Role in Wellness and Healthy Aging – AARP’s Latest Look Into the 50+ Tech Consumer

Most people over 70 years of age recognize technology’s role in supporting peoples’ health, we learn from a new report on 2024 Tech Trends and Adults 50+ from AARP. But adoption and ongoing use of digital innovations among older people will be tempered without attending to four key barriers that carry equal weight in the minds of 50+ consumers: design and user experience, awareness and interest, cost and acquisition, and trust and privacy concerns. [Spoiler alert: in the Hot Points, below, I add a fifth consideration: health equity + dignity].             To gauge older Americans’ views on

 

The Health Consumer in 2024 – The Health Populi TrendCast

At the end of each year since I launched the Health Populi blog, I have put my best forecasting hat on to focus on the next year in health and health care. For this round, I’m firmly focused on the key noun in health care, which is the patient – as consumer, as Chief Health Officer of the family, as caregiver, as health citizen. As my brain does when mashing up dozens of data points for a “trendcast” such as this, I’ll start with big picture/macro on the economy to the microeconomics of health care in the family and household,

 

An Extraordinary Life and Voice: A Call-to-Action from Casey Quinlan, featured in the Journal of Participatory Medicine

It is about time that a healthcare journal features examples of patient-leaders who have pioneered activism, innovation, and The first exemplar in this vein is Casey Quinlan, whom we lost all-too-soon earlier this year on 24th August. A team of her appreciative colleagues and friends wrote up the first in a new series called “Extraordinary Lives” published in the Journal of Participatory Medicine (JPM) titled “An Extraordinary Voice Expressed Through Humor: A Tribute to Casey Quinlan.” I played a minor role in getting this essay to the finish line, and am grateful to have had the opportunity to do so

 

An Antidote to Loneliness – Amazon’s 2023 Holiday Ad-Video Is A Lesson in Social Health, Aging and Love

To complement today’s sobering Health Populi post discussing Accenture’s 2024 Life Trends Study — an outlook for a decade of “deconstruction” based on technology and other trends in the ether — I share with you Amazon’s ad for this holiday season gift-giving motivation. The agency responsible for the campaign, Hungry Man and director Wayne McClammy, weave together a beautiful plotline of friendship, the Beatles’ In My Life, and a time-traveling image that captivated me. The evidence base on loneliness and aging is deep and quantifiable: loneliness can kill like a daily inhalation of a pack of cigarettes. It is up

 

Everybody is Stressed in America, and It’s Not Good for Our Health: the 2023 Update from the American Psychological Association

The U.S. is “a nation recovering from collective trauma,” the according to the latest survey on Stress in America 2023 from the American Psychological Association (APA).             The APA has been quantifying Stress in America since 2007; for context, at the end of that year The Great Recession kicked in, and in response President Obama’s team put together assistance to bolster the national economy, jobs, and health technology (codified in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act). American health citizens are experiencing a deja vu in 2023 akin to their financial stress experienced in the APA 2008 Stress

 

#BeBurnsAware – What To Know on National Burn Awareness Day

Today 11th October is National Burn Awareness Day 2023, and I’m supporting the effort for all of us to #BeBurnsAware.             I have become more bullish on Burn Awareness as I’ve come to learn more about the impact burns have on public, family, and children’s health globally. My teacher for better understanding burns and public health has been Krissie Stiles, a long-time burns nurse specialist and Ambassador to the Children’s Burns Trust in the UK. Meet Krissie. Burns are a global public health challenge, which I detailed here in Health Populi earlier this year. Today

 

Nurses Hacking for Health, Addressing Burnout, Workplace Violence, and AI

Three in four nurses working in hospitals care about the success of their institution — “they show up and gown up…yet only 57% feel a sense of ownership in their hospitals, leaving leaders to expect 100% quality to be delivered by about half of the nursing workforce.” This is the key finding in a study from PRC on the implications of nurses’ dis-engagement from their work. That context puts this year’s NurseHack4Health event all the more essential and impactful.             This year’s virtual hackathon was sponsored by Johnson & Johnson, SONSIEL, Microsoft, and the ALL

 

Grocery and Golf Goodness: Food, Fitness, and Fresh Come Together

“Groceries and glutes,” CNN reported in 2019 about a food store combining a gym in the store. While grocery stores have been embedded various fitness options into their brick-and-mortar footprints long before the pandemic, there’s a new riff on fitness at the grocer coming to Augusta, Georgia: grocery and golf. FreshTake, a new grocery store from a family-owned food chain, will open its doors in 2024, located in a Whole Foods location that closed in 2017. In addition to many modern amenities common to new-build suburban grocery locations, FreshTake will also feature a five-hole putting green. Along with outdoor seating,

 

The Omnichannel Imperative for Healthcare: Supporting Telehealth Awareness Week 2023

“What omnichannel really means: hearing the customer wherever they are and making them feel heard, valued, and understood.” That statement comes from Qualtrics’ explanation of omnichannel experience design. The very human needs of feeling one is heard, is valued, and is understood, underpin the rasion d’etre of omnichannel marketing. And these very values are those that underpin the trust between patients and providers and the large healthcare ecosystem.         It’s Telehealth Awareness Week, led by the ATA. I celebrate and support the effort; this Health Populi post explains the Association’s mantra that Telehealth is Health, and that

 

“Healthcare Isn’t Healthy:” the Global Challenge of Health Equity, and Calls-to-Action

Discrimination in health care is reported by more people in the U.S. than in Germany, Spain, or the U.K., we learn in the research reported in The Intersection of Health Equity in Communities & Business Strategy: A Call-to-Action, from Omnicomm PR Group (OPRG) and Atlantic Insights.                          The study was conducted among 6,000 people living in Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, fielding 1,500 interviews in each of the four countries in March 2023. The U.S. survey sample included 375 people identifying as Black, White, Hispanic, or

 

How Misinformation in Health Care Can Lead to Being “Dead Wrong” — KFF and Dr. G Connect the Dots

Three in four U.S. health citizens say the spread of false information about health issues is a major problem, found in Kaiser Family Foundation’s Health Misinformation Tracking Poll Pilot published earlier this month.           KFF’s press release on the study summarized the top-line with, “Most Americans Encounter Health Misinformation, and Most Aren’t Sure Whether It’s True or False.” Explaining the implications of the broad reach of health misinformation in the U.S., Dr. Geeta Nayyar has written the book Dead Wrong: Diagnosing and Treating Healthcare’s Misinformation Illness, due out on October 17th and available now for pre-purchase

 

Channeling Tip O’Neill: “All Public Health (Love) is Local,” U.S. Health Citizens Tell the de Beaumont Foundation

Appreciation for public health in America tends to be a local-love thing, according to research from the de Beaumont Foundation.              The COVID-19 pandemic raised health citizens’ awareness of the role and importance of public health — and for 7 in 10 people in the U.S., inspired a favorable opinion of their local public health officials, de Beaumont found. the Foundation’s President and CEO, Briant Castrucci, DrPH, observed, “The shared pandemic experience seems to have driven deeper familiarity with and support of public health departments and officials, along with a stronger understanding of the important

 

A Tale of Barbie, Beyonce and Taylor, the Economy and the Gynecologist

This weekend’s Wall Street Journal Saturday/Sunday edition featured a big story on the economic force of women in the summer of 2023, termed “the women’s multiplier effect” — that women’s spending is a powerful force in the U.S. economy (and as it turns out, in Sweden’s economy as well).                 The article was titled, “Women Own This Summer. The Economy Proves It,” and featured a Photoshopped image in various shades of pink with Margot Robbie as Barbie in the center, flanked by Beyonce to the left and Taylor Swift to the right. I’m

 

Pharmacy Plays a Growing Role in Consumers’ Health@Retail – J.D. Power’s 2023 Rankings

“Brick-and-mortar pharmacies forge meaningful connections with customers” through conversations between pharmacists and patients, “on a first-name basis.” This quote comes from Christopher Lis, managing director of global healthcare intelligence at J.D. Power who released the company’s annual 2023 U.S. Pharmacy Study today, the 15th year the research has been conducted.                           Each year, J.D. Power gauges U.S. consumers’ views on retail pharmacies in four channels: brick and mortar chain drug stores, brick and mortar mass merchandisers, brick and mortar supermarkets, and mail order. Across all four channels, the

 

Aging and the New Home Health, Tech-Enabled – Learning from Nature

“Digital technologies offer tremendous potential for shifting from traditional medical routines to remote medicine,” with the role of wearables playing a growing role in the new home care for healthy aging. But what are the challenges of deploying this promising tech with older people keen to be independent at home? We learn a lot about prospects and challenges in Digital health for aging populations, a Perspective report in Nature Medicine‘s July 2023 issue.                   An experienced team affiliated with the University of California San Diego shares their insights in this essay, which

 

Can Artists Help to Remake Medicine? A New Book Asks and Answers (Yes!)

What if we asked an artist to re-imagine what health care could be? How might Van Gogh redesign a patient room akin to his room at Arles, or Michelangelo re-think general surgery? How might Thoreau take us on a nature walk for our mental health, or Basquiat channel his inner Da Vinci for a version of Jean-Michel’s Anatomy? In her new book, Artists Remaking Medicine. Emily Peters confronts health care’s paralyzing complexity (her words in the introduction) to invite a community of artists and artful thinkers to share their visions for remaking health care.             

 

Location, Location, Location – Understanding Health Consumers’ Evolving Definition of Convenience

The definition of “convenience” in the eyes of patients, consumers, and caregivers is multi-faceted, with the concept of “location” shifting both physically and digitally. We learn this in new research from JLL, the global real estate services company. “Why is a real estate services company doing research into consumers’ views on health care?” you might ask. See my Hot Points below, discussing my views on the morphing of health care real estate from Pill Hill and inpatient hospitals to the home and closer-to-home sites.             In the 2023 Patient Consumer Survey report, the topline lesson

 

Happy 75th Birthday, NHS – Through A U.S. Health Care Lens

The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) turns 75 today.             The NHS was the brainchild of Minister of Health Aneurin Bevan; he wrote in a statement to doctors and nurses in The Lancet on July 3, 1948,  “My job is to give you all the facilities, resources, apparatus and help I can, and then to leave you alone as professional men and women to use your skill and judgement without hindrance.” This week in The Lancet, the editors assert, “The founding principles of the NHS put into practice 75 years ago are at risk of

 

Uber Health: A Good Example of “Connective Tissue” in the Health Care Ecosystem

We often talk about “the last mile” as the difficulty in getting broadband to cover folks in rural areas or bringing a product to fruition for delivery in a market.               Uber Health is trying to solve another riff on the “last mile” challenge, which is expanding delivery of groceries and over-the-counter medicines to people who may be cut-off from transportation options, compelled to stay home due to physical limitations, or otherwise simply demanding the convenience of home delivery for basic daily needs related to their health. The service will be enabled through Uber

 

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

 

Mental Health Services Grow in the Retail Health Ecosystem

With May being Mental Health Awareness Month, there’s no shortage of press releases promoting a wide range of services and programs emerging from both the public and private sectors. In the wake of the COVID-19 public health crisis, the exposed epidemic-beyond-the-pandemic of mental health has inspired many collaborations between public, private commercial and not-for-profit organizations. These have begun to embed mental health into the larger retail health ecosystem. I’ll point to several examples as signposts for this phenomenon.           Walgreens and Mental Health America – This collaboration expands Walgreens’ work with Mental Health America focusing in

 

The New Loneliness Health Agenda from Dr. Vivek Murphy, US Surgeon General

This week, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy unveiled a plan to address loneliness in America. This isn’t a theoretical thing: Dr. Murthy has come out of the loneliness closet to tell us that he, too, has confronted and dealt with to loneliness, putting himself  out there/here as Exhibit A in the epidemic of Americans who are lonely — and suffering risks across every dimension of personal and social health. The New York Times published Dr. Murthy’s op-ed on the issue in the Sunday issue in a call-to-action titled, “We have become a lonely nation. It’s time to fix that.”

 

Women’s Health on Her Own Terms – “She Knows” What She Needs

Despite some improvement in the representation of women by cinema, TV shows, and brands, distortions in media remain that are risks to women receiving appropriate health care. Breaking through taboos of weight, reproductive services, and mental health are the top 3 factors preventing women from getting proper care, according to Health On Her Terms, a research study from WPP and Ogilvy partnering with SeeHer, an organization of collaborations from media, technology, business, education, and other sectors (including over 7,000 brands) focused on the accurate portrayal of women and girls in society. Taglined as “The Marketer’s Hippocratic Oath to Women, the

 

Bolstering Health Literacy in a Little Book: Burn Prevention and Care With “The Family Oops”

About 180,000 deaths are attributable to burns each year, according to the World Health Organization. Non-fatal burns are a leading cause of morbidity. The good news is that burns are preventable, and we learn several terrific strategies for doing so from The Family Oops and Burns First Aid. This mighty little book, all of 28 pages and measuring 5.5 x 5.5″ square, packs a huge amount of self-care knowledge about burn prevention and treatment for home and workplace — the two sites where most burns happen, WHO attests. The Family Oops is a wonderful example of how a health literacy

 

Food Is Medicine, Especially When You Are Hungry – The American Heart Association‘s FIM Initiative

Food is a basic need, fundamental to our lives and well-being. And for millions of people around the world, and innumerable health citizens in the U.S., food security is part of daily life in 2023. Furthermore, as the U.S. Congress faces voting on the debt ceiling, the issue of SNAP benefits for nutritional assistance (aka “food stamps”) has been identified as a negotiating line-item by certain Federal budget-cut minded folks. That’s why the Food Is Medicine Initiative, launched collaboratively between the American Heart Association and The Rockefeller Foundation, is so timely and welcome.         “The vision for

 

Consumers Expect Every Company to Play a Meaningful Role in “My Health” – New Insights from the 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer

People have expanded their definitions of health in 2023, with mental health supplanting physical health for the top-ranked factor in feeling healthy. Welcome to the Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report: Trust and Health, released this week, with striking findings about how the economic, post-pandemic life, pollution and climate change all feed mis-trust among citizens living in 13 countries — and their eroding trust for health care systems.         While these factors vary by country in terms of relative contribution to citizen trust, note that in the U.S., social polarization plays an outsized role in factors that “make us

 

The ROI on Feeling Cared-For At Work – Employer Trust, Love, and Building the Joyconomy

“Can employers afford not to care?” MetLife’s 21st annual U.S. Employee Benefit Trends Study asks and answers that question, with a resounding and evidence-based “NO.”                 I’m in Salt Lake City today discussing the drivers of health, “yesterday, today, and tomorrow” at the Virgin Pulse Thrive Summit, celebrating the ten-year anniversary of the company. As you would expect from an organization that is part of Richard Branson’s business ecosystem, the meeting will be energetically produced, delivering insights wrapped in info-taining ways. One of those features will be my being invited to create a

 

The Commercial Determinants of Health – How the Private Sector Shapes Public and Peoples’ Health

You’ve heard of the social determinants of health (SDoH), the driving factors that shape a person’s health beyond medical care. These include lifestyle behaviors such as smoking and food consumption, education, job security and wage stability, transportation and safe/clean physical environments, among other issues. There’s another lens on drivers of health that impact our well-being, the commercial determinants of health (CDoH). The Lancet‘s collection of research published online on March 23, 2022 explores CDoH’s role in shaping public and individual health, along with potential calls-to-action for addressing these challengres.               Start with a definition of

 

The New Deaths of Despair in America – Among U.S. Children

The phenomenon of Deaths of Despair is the short-hand name for rising mortality among certainly people living in the U.S. due to overdose, accidents, and suicide. Angus Deaton and Anne Case published their first of many research papers on Deaths of Despair in 2015. Their research uncovered the risks of dying a Death of Despair to be higher among men, especially those between the ages of 25 and 64. But mortality isn’t only going in the wrong direction for those people most closely associated with the Deaths of Despair demographic: there’s another life-span line graph moving in the wrong direction,

 

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

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

 

Enabling better health care, everywhere – my conversation with Microsoft

I am grateful to have been given the opportunity to brainstorm omnichannel health care for people to enable better health care for all, anywhere and everywhere, with Team Microsoft. Key opinion leader Molly McCarthy and I covered a lot of ground in this webcast conversation as part of Microsoft’s series of three “Expert  perspectives on trends driving change in healthcare.”             Molly and I covered a lot of ground here, starting with the key forces shaping and accelerating virtual care across the continuum. While these were in place before the COVID-19 pandemic, the public health

 

The Future of Love and How It Could Shape Health, Well-Being, and Daily Living

“The future of love is bound to the institutions that have historically shaped and defined it,” Ipsos’s What the Future: Love report begins. Consider: religion, government, financial institutions….and the health care ecosystem, as well. On this Valentine’s Day 14th February 2023, it is a good time to consider this convergence as health politics, financial well-being, and emerging technologies will be re-shaping institutions and consumers in the coming months and near-term.           The Ipsos researchers have been assessing the future of many aspects of our lives over the past couple of years, such as the future of wellness,

 

Bayer at The Big Game LVII: the Heart Health Ecosystem is Ripe for Self-Care and DIY Health at Home

Joke if you must about Big Game cuisine being typically packed with calories and fat and carbs….and as such, not-so-great for health. For me, the ads are the attraction during The Big Game (along with the Philadelphia Eagles). In this year’s ad line-up, health will be featured in high-priced spots as it has for the past few years. Last year, I was intrigued by a female-focused 30-second spot from Hologic, educating viewers on cervical cancer, discussed here in Health Populi.         This year, my eyes are on Bayer Aspirin’s campaign “encouraging sports fans to keep their heart

 

Wellness in 2023 Is About Connections, Mental Health and Science – Global Wellness Summit’s 2023 Trends

Consumers’ wellness life-flows and demands in 2023 will go well beyond exercise resolutions, eating more greens, and intermittent fasting as a foodstyle. It’s time for us to get the annual update on health consumers from the multi-faceted team who curated the Global Wellness Summit’s annual report on The Future of Wellness 2023 Trends.                   In this year’s look into wellness for the next few years, we see that health-oriented consumers are seeking solutions for dealing with loneliness and mental health, weight and hydration, travel-as-medicine as health destinations, and — not surprisingly —

 

The US Healthcare System Outspends and Underperforms While Most People Live Paycheck to Paycheck

The U.S. is an outlier in the world for high health care spending, as well as in low achievement for life expectancy at birth — 3 years less than that in peer OECD countries — discussed in U.S. Health Care from a Global Perspective, 2022: Accelerating Spending, Worsening Outcomes, the latest look into American health system performance in a global context from The Commonwealth Fund. Another study published in JAMA this week talks about the Organization and Performance of US Health Systems, calling out the fact that, “Small quality differentials combined with large price differentials suggests that health systems have

 

What Are Patients Looking for in a Doctor? It Depends on Who You Ask…and Their Race

While the same proportion of Black and White patients say they are looking for a doctor with empathy and compassion, there are relatively large differences between patients based on their race, found in the Everyday Health-Castle Connolly Physician-Consumer study.             The survey was conducted in December 2022 among a group of 1,001 U.S. consumers and 277 Castle Connolly health care professionals. As the first bar chart illustrates “where patients differ, “Black people were nearly twice as likely as white people (41 percent versus 22 percent) to completely agree that they would be more comfortable and

 

The Polarization of Trust in 2023 – What It Means for Health, via Edelman at Davos WEF 23

For the third year in a row, citizens in most of the world see business as the most-trusted institution, above government, media, and NGOs, found in the 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer, unveiled this week at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.                       The Edelman team conducted this 23rd annual study in November 2022 in 28 countries, among over 32,000 people — some 1,150 residents per country polled. (Note that Russia, studied in the surveys between 2007 and 2022, was not included in the 2023 research). The first chart arrays

 

Of All Forms of Inequality, Injustice in Health Care is the Most Shocking and Inhumane: Listening to Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today as we appreciate the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., I post a photo of him in my hometown of Detroit in 1963, giving a preliminary version of the “I Have a Dream” speech he would deliver two months later in Washington, DC.               Wisdom from the speech: “But now more than ever before, America is forced to grapple with this problem, for the shape of the world today does not afford us the luxury of an anemic democracy. The price that this nation must pay for the continued oppression and exploitation of the

 

While Nurses and Doctors Still Rank Highest in Trust, Gallup Finds Trust-Erosion by Party ID

In the annual 2023 Gallup poll on honesty and ethics in professions in the U.S., the good news for the human capital of health care is that nurses, physicians and pharmacists continue to lead Americans’ ratings across professions in first, second, and third place respectively. The bummer is that that trust equity has eroded in the past year — especially among health citizens who identify as Republican voters.                   Start with the upside, which is the perennial Gallup finding that health care’s front-line workers are the most-trusted professions in the U.S. And

 

Telehealth and Spirituality – a View From Florence, Italy

I’m in Florence, Italy, this week, working on Slow Food as medicine and finding myself contemplating spirituality, health and wellbeing as I walk the streets of this grand city of the Renaissance.       Imagine my surprise, yesterday, walking through the city center by the glorious Duomo, the great dome of the cathedral named Santa Maria del Fiore, with the beautiful Baptistry built just across the piazza. You see my initial view approaching the square here, the church and Duomo on the left and the Baptistry on the right.         Now cast your eyes in the