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
As SNAP Benefits Were Threatened to be Cut in the U.S., Eli Lilly’s Obesity Drugs Rose to the World’s Best-Selling Drug
Today, 1 November, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) was to be shuttered and unfunded in at least 25 states until the U.S. Congress agreed to re-open the Federal government and fund this safety net for food security that covers 42 million people in America. Those 42 million people included 16 million children, about 39% of SNAP program beneficiaries. Then last night, a Federal judge intervened to order President Trump’s administration to reinstate funding for food assistance just-in-time. At this moment, I cannot tell you what the exact timing nor the amounts beneficiaries will receive will be.
The Real Face of Men’s Health in America: Years of Life Lost, Yearning for Social Connection, and Eroding Trust in Health Care
In 2023, more than one-half of male deaths in the U.S. were premature: this is The Real Face of Men’s Health in America, a new report analyzing 2025 U.S. data from the Movember Foundation. The report was published as we approach November which the project chose for Men’s Health Month when launching in Australia over 20 years ago. Compared with the rest of the economically-developed world, Movember found that the “U.S. stands out for the sheer number of years of life lost (YLL), as well as the enormous toll of men’s early deaths
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
The Shorter-Term Future of Healthtech is AI for Administration – Silicon Valley Bank Reads the Tea Leaves
Too much money is going into too many untested AI applications in health care, we learn in The Future of Healthtech 2025 from Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). While “the new healthtech is here” in the form of AI-everything, SVB points out that it’s “Provider Ops” and the back office that’s driving the sector. “Healthtech is now definitively an administrative sector, not a clinical one,” SVB asserts in the first of three key themes plot-lining the report. What sets the stage for context are these four important
Why I Love The LEGO MRI Scanner
Over one million children around the world have played with an MRI building set from LEGO, which has reduced the young patients’ feelings of anxiety pre-scan along with reducing levels of need for anaesthesia to prep for the MRI procedure, according to the company’s October 13 press release. The LEGO MRI set is a project of The LEGO Foundation and its commitment to ESG — Environmental, Societal, and Governance goals. “Since 2023, more than 10,000 LEGO MRI Scanner sets have been donated to hospitals and health professionals around the world as part of the LEGO
Paging Dr. Verily – What Consumers Want from Health Tech: Personalization, Control, Privacy, and Ease
“What do consumers want from their health technology?” wondered a poll conducted among smartphone-owning health care decision makers. Greater control and engagement in health care, assurance of privacy and security for their health data. and greater personalization of advice coming out of the analysis of that shared personal health information. Welcome to the Consumer Survey on Personal Health Technology, market research conducted by Verily with The Harris Poll among 2,000 U.S. adults 18 and older in July 2025. The screening criteria used to include a survey respondent were two-fold: whether they owned a smartphone, and made the majority of their
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
What Pantone’s and Insulet’s Omnipod Mango Colorway Means for Patients and Community
“From Pod to Pantone: Omnipod Mango becomes an iconic color,” the Insulet press release reads. How delighted I am to see that Insulet has collaborated with Pantone on developing the Omnipod Mango color for the company’s insulin delivery system. Here’s some of the story. So why “Mango?” To celebrate individualism and empowerment…and break away from “the world of traditional blues that dominate the medical and diabetes landscapes.” Instead….a bright tropical orange instead of the “medical blues,” as the color researchers pointed out. How wonderful is this? Uplifting, joyful, and representative of the Podders community and identity.
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
The Least-Positively Viewed Industries in America are the Federal Government, Pharma, and Advertising – The 2025 Gallup Poll on Industry-Love in America
In 2025, most Americans feel positive about farming and agriculture, the computer industry, and restaurants. At the opposite end of industry-love are the Federal Government, pharmaceutical companies, and advertising and PR, we learn in Gallup’s annual ratings of 25 key U.S. business sectors survey, fielded in August 2025. Here’s the eye-straining table of those 25 sectors, calling out health care which has a net majority negative rating by 51% of U.S. adults: that is, 27% feeling somewhat negative about healthcare, and 24% feeling “very negative” about
How Consumers’ Access to Telehealth Impacts Medical Real Estate and Design Decisions
The idea of “hospitality” in health care is not new, but the nature of how patients-as-consumers are dealing with health care choices based on what looks and feels good is changing the nature of what hospitality means in technology-enabled health care delivery, we learn from the 2025 Patient Consumer Survey conducted by JLL. Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. (JLL) is one of the largest global commercial real estate firms with a strong portfolio of medical buildings. So it is worthwhile to track what the company is learning about health care delivery distributed both inside and outside of brick-and-mortar medical buildings.
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
Trust Is Eroding for Vaccines Among U.S. Parents — New Insights from KFF and the Washington Post
By the summer of 2025, 1 in 6 U.S. parents had skipped or delayed childhood vaccinations, discovered in the 37th annual edition of the KFF/The Washington Survey of Parents. The study was conducted among 2,716 parents or legal guardians of children, via interviews online in English and Spanish between July 18 and August 4, 2025. In detail by demographic, 83% of all U.S. parents had kept children up-to-date with recommended childhood vaccines (16% not doing so) 74% of self-described MAGA Republicans kept kids up to date with the recommended vaccines (25% not doing so),
Dr. Osterholm Explains “The Big One” – A Deja Vu Moment with a True North Public Health Expert
“The truism that no one is completely safe until everyone is safe is a truism because it happens to be true.” So caution Michael Osterholm, epidemiologist, professor at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, and director of CIDRAP (the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the U-MN) and collaborating writer Mark Olshaker in their new book, The Big One. (In this post, for the sake of brevity, I’ll refer to the two authors as “O&O”). Simply put, the tagline tells us what we are about to read: a
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
Jane will be working with EU-based clients in October-November 2025, collaborating with stakeholders in digital health, public/community health, retail health, and growing opportunities for health-at-home. Stay tuned to her updates here on Health Populi on-the-ground as she lives the digital nomadic work-life in Ireland, Italy, Spain, and the (non-EU) UK.