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Healthcare Policies We Can Agree On: Pre-Existing Conditions, Drug Prices, and PillPack – the June 2018 KFF Health Tracking Poll

There are countless chasms in the U.S. this moment in social, political, and economic perspectives. but one issue is on the mind of most American voters where there is evidence of some agreements: health care, as evidenced in the June 2018 Health Tracking Poll from Kaiser Family Foundation. Top-line, health care is one of the most important issues that voters want addressed in the 2018 mid-term elections, tied with the economy. Immigration, gun policy, and foreign policy follow. While health care is most important to voters registered as Democrats, Republicans rank it very important. Among various specific health care factors, protecting

 

Design, Empathy and Ethics Come to Healthcare: HXD

Design-thinking has come to health/care, finally, and Amy Cueva has been beating this drum for a very long time. I’m delighted to be in her collegial circle, speaking at the conference about the evolving healthcare consumer who’s financially strapped, stressed-out, and Amazon Primed for customer service. I’m blogging live while attending HXD 2018 in Cambridge, MA, the health/care design conference convened by Mad*Pow, 26th and 27th June 2018. Today was Day 1 and I want to recap my learnings and share with you. Amy, Founder and Chief Experience Office of Mad*Pow, kicked off the conference with context-setting and inspiration. Design

 

Obese, Access-Challenged and Self-Rationing: America’s Health Vs Rest-of-World

          The U.S. gets relatively low ROI for its relatively exorbitant spending on healthcare, noted once again in the latest Health at a Glance, the annual OECD report on member nations’ healthcare systems. The report includes U.S. country data asking, “How does the United States compare?” with its sister OECD countries. The answer is, “not well across most population health, access, and mortality measures.” For the Cliff’s Notes/Where’s Waldo top-line of the research, find the two long bars in this chart heading “south” of the OECD average, and one long blue bar going “north.” The northern climbing bar

 

Hospitals Work to Address Customer Experience Gap With Consumers, Kaufman Hall Finds

Hospital and healthcare providers are getting real about improving patient and health consumer experience, the latest Kaufman Hall research finds. The company’s 2018 State of Consumerism in Healthcare report is out, subtitled, “Activity in Search of Strategy.” Kaufman Hall has developed a Healthcare Consumerism Index for healthcare providers based on four pillars: access to care, consumer experience, pricing, and a strong foundation of consumer insights. Based on their assessment of providers on these components, Kaufman Hall found identified four tiers of performance: The top-performing group, Tier 1, includes only 8% of providers. These are the early adopters who allocate resources

 

Patients have ambitious health goals, and look to doctors for help

Consumers have health goals across many dimensions, topped with eating well, getting fit, reducing stress, sleeping better, feeling mentally well, and improving personal finances. That’s an ambitious health-and-wellness list, identified in the Health Ambitions Study, the first such research Aetna has published. Six in ten people are looking to food and nutrition for health, whether as “medicine” to deal with chronic conditions, for weight loss or general wellness, which is a frequent theme here on Health Populi. Consumers embrace their food habits as a key self-care determinant of health. Fitness, cited by most consumers, is also a can-do, self-powered activity

 

Good Coffee + Engaging Design + Banking = Financial Health

As I walked by windows with Marvel-inspired superhero characters, I stopped to read their talk-bubbles: “strengthen your savings, power your financial quest, be the hero of your money, be one with your budget.” The top-line message here is that you can be your own fiscal superhero. The sign read, Capital One Cafe with Peet’s Coffee. But was it a bank branch or a cafe? I asked myself, passing by this sign yesterday morning at the corner of Walnut and 18th Streets in center city Philadelphia. It’s both, as it turned out, and when I entered I found a welcoming, beautifully

 

The True Costs of Diabetes Go Well Beyond the Wallet

The daily life of a person managing diabetes feels many costs: at work, on relationships, at play, during sleep, on time, on mental health, and to be sure, on personal finances. The True Cost of Diabetes report from Upwell details the many tolls on the person with diabetes. The first-order impact for a patient engaging in self-care to manage diabetes is time that the many tasks in a day borrow from work, sleep, home-keeping, and relationships. Seventy percent of PwD (people with diabetes) checks blood sugar at least once a day (41% one to two times, 29% three to five

 

It Could Take Five Generations for a Low-Income US Family to Reach Average Income in America

Social mobility in America has a lot of friction: children of wealthier people tend to grow into affluence, and children of low-income parents tend to struggle to move up the income and education ladder, according to A Broken Social Elevator: How to Promote Social Mobility, a new report from the OECD. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development studied member nations’ economies, demographics, income and opportunities to gauge each country’s social mobility. Social mobility, the OECD explains, is multi-faceted. It can refer to inter-generational mobility between parents, children, and grandchildren. Alternatively, social mobility can look at intra-generational mobility, over the course

 

Consumers Grow to View Food as the Prescription

Taking a page out of Hippocrates, “let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food,” consumers are increasingly shopping for groceries with an appetite for health, found in research published this week by the International Food Information Center cleverly titled, An Appetite for Health. The top line: over two-thirds of older adults are managing more than one chronic condition and looking to nutrition to help manage disease. Most consumers have that “appetite for health” across a wide range of conditions, with two rising to the top as “extremely important:” heart health and brain function. Other top-ranked issues are emotional/mental

 

As Medical Cost Trend Remains Flat, Patients Face Growing Health Consumer Financial Stress

When it comes to healthcare costs, lines that decline over time are generally seen as good news. That’s how media outlets will cover the top-line of PwC’s report Medical cost trend: Behind the numbers 2019. However, there are other forces underneath the stable-looking 6.0% medical trend growth projected for 2019 that will impact healthcare providers, insurers, and suppliers to the industry. There’s this macro-health economic story, and then there’s the micro-economics of healthcare for the household. Simply put: the impact of growing financial risk for healthcare costs will be felt by patients/consumers themselves. I’ve curated the four charts from the

 

Pope Francis is a Public Health Advocate

“The world today is mostly deaf,” the Pontiff observes in Pope Francis: A Man of His Word, Wim Wenders’ documentary on this religious leader who likes to quote Dostoevsky, joke about mothers-in-law, and advocate for the sick, the poor, the disenfranchised, and Planet Earth. He is, I realized while watching this film and hearing this man of words, a public health advocate. Throughout the film, we see clips of Pope Francis washing the feet of prisoners in Philadelphia, comforting dying children in a pediatric clinic in central Africa, and speaking out to the U.S. Congress about the dangers of climate

 

Thinking About Kate and Anthony – Suicide and Depression Is US

Yesterday at 1 pm, we learned that the incidence of suicide is up in America in a report from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), an agency in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. This morning, we awake to news that Anthony Bourdain, the witty and prolific travel and food expert, took his own life. Earlier this week, Kate Spade, fashion designer and creative force, took her own life. The loss of these two bright lights, gone from our lives to suicide within a few days of each other, gives me the sad compulsion to say something, again, about

 

Technology, Aging and Obesity Drive Healthcare Spending, BEA Finds

The U.S. Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) released, for the first time, data that quantifies Americans’ spending to treat 261 medical conditions, from “A” diseases like acute myocardial infarction, acute renal failure, ADHD, allergic reactions, anxiety disorders, appendicitis and asthma, to dozens of other conditions from the rest of the alphabet. High Spending Growth Rates For Key Diseases In 2000-14 Were Driven By Technology And Demographic Factors, a June 2018 Health Affairs article, analyzed this data. This granular information comes from the BEA’s satellite account, using data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey which nationally examines expenditures by disease;

 

Doctors Say EHRs Are Good for Storage, But Risky for Patient Relationships and Burnout

Doctors have a complicated relationship with electronic health records (EHRs): two-thirds of primary care providers (PCPs) see value in digital records (EHRs), but at the same time believe the technology has weakened relationships with patients, detracted from clinical effectiveness, and lack streamlined user experience. That deficiency is, in three words, lack of interoperability; that challenge has required one-half of physician-users to use work-around’s to make their EHR investments more useful. These insights come out of a survey conducted among primary care providers by The Harris Poll for Stanford Medicine, published to coincide with the medical school’s convening of the EHR

 

Doing Less Can Be Doing More for Healthcare – the Biggest Takeaway From ASCO 2018

Less can lead to more for so many things: eating smaller portions, lowering sugar consumption, and driving less in favor of walking or cycling come to mind. When it comes to healthcare utilization, doing less can also result in equal or even better outcomes. Groundbreaking research presented at this week’s ASCO meeting found that some women diagnosed with certain forms of cancer do not benefit from undergoing chemotherapy. The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) is one of the largest medical meetings annually, and at this huge meeting these research results for the TAILORx trial were huge news with big

 

Mary Meeker on Healthcare in 2018: Connectivity, Consumerization, and Costs

  Health care features prominently in the nearly-300 slides curated by Mary Meeker in her always- informative report on Internet Trends 2018.  Meeker, of Kleiner Perkins, released the report as usual at the Code Conference, held this year on 30 May 2018 in Silicon Valley. I’ve mined Meeker’s report for several years here on Health Populi: 2017 – Digital healthcare at the inflection point, via Mary Meeker 2015 – Musings with Mary Meeker on the digital/health nexus 2014 – Healthcare at an inflection point: digital trends via Mary Meeker 2013 – The role of internet technologies in reducing healthcare costs – Meeker