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The Racial Divide Due to COVID-19 Also Applies to Healthcare and Pharma Costs

Into the sixth month of the coronavirus pandemic in the U.S., it’s clear that COVID-19 has wreaked a greater mortality and morbidity impact on people of color than on white adults. A new Gallup-West Health poll found that the coronavirus also concerns more non-white Americans than whites when it comes to the cost of health care and medicines to deal with the effects of COVID-19. Considering the cost of COVID-19 treatment, across all U.S. adults, 40% of people are concerned (extremely/concerned), and 41% are “not at all concerned.” Broken down by race, there is a stark difference in levels of

 

We Are All About Hygiene, Groceries, and Personal Care in the Midst of the Coronavirus Pandemic

Pass me the Clorox…tip the UPS driver…love thy grocer. These are our daily life-flows in the Age of COVID-19. Our basic needs are reflected in the new 2020 Axios-Harris Poll, released today. For the past several years, I’ve covered the Harris Poll of companies’ reputation rankings here in Health Populi. Last year, Wegmans, the grocer, ranked #1; Amazon, #2. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, U.S. consumers’ basic needs are emerging as health and hygiene, food, and technology, based on the new Axios-Harris Poll on the top 100 companies. This year’s study was conducted in four waves, with the

 

News from the Consumer Technology Association and Withings Further Demonstrates Private Sector’s Role in the Pandemic and Public Health

This week, announcements from the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) and Withings further bolster the case for the private sector bolstering public health in this pandemic…and future ones to come beyond the Age of the Coronavirus. Since the pandemic emerged, CTA has been reaching out to members and stakeholders to be a useful resource for the consumer electronics industry and its customers. Digital health resources have been an especially useful touch point for CTA’s constituents (including me, as a member who is active with the Association). On 27th July, CTA announced the Association’s launch of the Public Health Tech Initiative. In

 

The Home and Low-Touch Health Care – a Health Consumer Update from Capgemini

The coronavirus pandemic has been a wake-up call for patients-as-consumers, seeking lower-touch health care services at home or closer-to-home in community health hubs. The need for a holistic platform the serves up a continuum-of-care tools across the patient journey became evident in a matter of months, Capgemini Research Institute calls out in The Health Fix, a research report assessing peoples’ perspectives on health care in the Age of COVIOD-19. Capgemini conducted a survey among over 2,000 consumers living in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. in mid-June 2020. The report found three big shifts in global health citizens’

 

The Unbearable Heaviness of Healthcare in America – the Change Healthcare/Harris Poll

The phrase, “burden of health care,” has two usual meanings: one, to do with the massive chronic care burden, and the other, involving costs. There’s a third area of burden in U.S. health care — the onerous patient experience in finding and accessing care, assessed in the 2020 Change Healthcare – Harris Poll Consumer Experience Index. Two in three U.S. consumers feel like “every step of the healthcare process is a chore.” That burdensome patient experience leads to one in two people in America avoiding seeking care, the poll found. That’s not just self-rationing health care due to costs, but due

 

Return-To-School Is Stressing Out U.S. Parents Across Income, Race and Political Party

The worse of the coronavirus pandemic is yet to come, most Americans felt in July 2020. That foreboding feeling is shaping U.S. parents’ concerns about their children returning to school, with the calendar just weeks away from educators opening their classrooms to students, from kindergarten to the oldest cohort entering senior year of high school. The Kaiser Family Foundation’s July 2020 Health Tracking Poll focuses on the COVID-19 pandemic, return-to-school, and the governments’ response. KFF polled 1,313 U.S. adults 18 and older between July 14 to 19, 2020. The first line chart illustrates Americans’ growing concerns about the coronavirus, shifting

 

Telehealth Platforms: Building Blocks for Omnichannel, Networked Healthcare

In the U.S., the use of telehealth services tripled in the past year, as healthcare providers limited patients from in-person visits for care and patients sought to avoid exposure to the coronavirus in medical settings. With this alignment of virtual care supply-and-demand, it is like telehealth will see “permanent usage increases,” according to Parks Associates’ survey report, COVID-19 – Impact on Telehealth Use and Perspectives. Parks Associates fielded this study the second half of May 2020, surveying 5,008 heads-of-broadband households balancing the sample of respondents for age, gender, income, and education. The report reminds us for context that at the

 

More Americans Pivot to Distancing and Mask-Wearing in the Hot Summer of 2020

With growing coronavirus case hotspots in southern and western states, more Americans perceive the pandemic is worsening this summer, shown by a Gallup poll published 20 July 2020. Gallup titles the analysis, Americans’ social distancing steady as pandemic worsens. The first table organizes Gallup’s data by demographics, illustrating a significant gap between how women perceive the exacerbating pandemic compared with men. In early June, roughly one-third of both men and women saw COVID-19 was getting “worse”; five weeks later, in the second week of July, men and women’s perceptions were 12 points apart with more women concerned about the situation

 

A New Era of Virtual Care Has Begun, Accenture Finds

Patients embraced virtual care and communications at very high rates in the first months of the pandemic, and want to continue to use telehealth platforms after the pandemic ends. The new era of virtual care has begun and is here to stay, Accenture expects in its latest look at How COVID-19 will permanently alter patient behavior, a patient survey conducted in May 2020. Accenture polled 2,700 patients around the world, 450 participants each from China, France, Germany, Japan, the U.K., and the U.S. Patients represented one of three conditions, with one-third each managing cardiovascular, immunology/rheumatology, and oncology. Topline, consumers “faced

 

The Median Hospital Charge In the U.S. for COVID-19 Care Ranges From $34-45K

The median charge for hospitalizing a patient with COVID-19 ranged from $34,662 for people 23 to 30, and $45,683 for people between 51 and 60 years of age, according to FAIR Health’s research brief, Key Characteristics of COVID-19 Patients published July 14th, 2020. FAIR Health based these numbers on private insurance claims associated with COVID-19 diagnoses, evaluating patient demographics (age, gender, geography), hospital charges and estimated allowed amounts, and patient comorbidities. They used two ICD-10-CM diagnostic codes for this research: U07.1, 2019-nCoV acute respiratory disease; and, B97.29, other coronavirus as the cause of disease classified elsewhere which was the original code

 

A Toxic Side Effect of the Coronavirus: Financial Unwellness

One in two people in the U.S. say their financial health has been negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, through job loss, income disruption, or reduced work hours. The 2020 Financial Wellness Census, from Prudential found that one-half of U.S. adults are anxious about their financial future as of May 2020, an increase from 38% in late 2019. Prudential surveyed 3,000 U.S. adults across three generational cohorts: Millennials, Gen X, and Baby Boomers. The economic hit from the pandemic has disproportionately impacted people of color, younger people, women, small business owners, gig workers, and people working in retailer harder than

 

How Retailers Are the New Public Health Purveyors

CVS stopped selling tobacco on October 1, 2014. In that moment, a Fortune 100 company stepped an entire foot, and not just a toe, into public health waters. [I covered that event with joy here in Health Populi as soon as it was announced months earlier on February 14th]. The company re-branded from CVS/pharmacy to CVS Health. That was a watershed moment in U.S. public health history, a wave that has continued to grow over the past six years to this moment, in the thick of the coronavirus pandemic. This week’s news that Best Buy will require shoppers to wear

 

From Dr. Fauci to Peloton, Healthcare and Wellness Baked Into Ad Age’s Top 20 Brands for 2020

Advertising Age announced their list of the top 20 brands in 2020 this week. Ad Age’s lens on these was heavily tinted by consumers’ lives coping with the coronavirus pandemic: “The coronavirus has brought new attention to typically boring, decades-old consumer staples, while hastening the rise of digital newcomers that were only just beginning to gain traction pre-pandemic,” Ad Age explains in the introduction to the list of the selected brands. As the editors of the MadMen-and-Women’s most influential industry publication, they explain, “Ad Age chronicles 20 brands that are having a moment.” This moment to them as well as

 

How Covid-19 Can Inspire Tech-Enabled Value-Based Health Care in a Cash-Constrained America

“The COVID-19 pandemic…has highlighted like never before the pitfalls of paying for healthcare based on the number of patients seen and services rendered,” a Modern Healthcare article asserted in mid-June 2020. In other words, the U.S. health care financing regime of volume-based payment didn’t fare well as millions of patients postponed or cancelled procedures and visits for fear of contracting the virus in the halls, offices and clinics of hospitals and doctor’s offices. “Just imagine if you were 100% fee-for-service,” commented Dr. Fuad Sheriff, a primary care physician whose practice is based on capitated payments. “You would have been dead

 

Most Virtual Care Consumers, Satisfied With Visits in the COVID Era, Expect It for Future Care

Within days of the coronavirus pandemic emerging in the U.S., health care providers set up virtual care arrangements to convene with patients. Three months into the COVID-19 crisis, how have patients felt about these telehealth visits? In Patient Perspectives on Virtual Care, Kyruus answers this question based on an online survey of 1,000 patients 18 years of age and older, conducted in May 2020. Each of these health consumers had at least one virtual care visit between February and May 2020. The key findings were that: Engaging in a virtual visit was a new-new thing for 72% of people Patients’

 

Trust Is a Key Social Currency for COVID-Embattled Consumers

The coronavirus pandemic has re-shaped patients into consumers, concerned about managing the risk of contracting the virus, millions of people experiencing months of sheltering, working, learning, and cooking at home. Combine these new life-flows with conflicting information about the nature, severity, and life-span of COVID-19: From three levels of government leaders: The President and the Executive Branch at the Federal Level, Governors of States, and Mayors of cities; Public health agencies, especially the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization; Mass media; and, Social media. Re-entering life in the “next normal” requires a large dose of trust,

 

Beyond Care and Outcomes, Hospitals Must Deliver on Civics, Inclusivity, Equity, and Value – Lown Institute’s Best Hospitals

The core business of hospitals is patient care, often baked with teaching and research. But wait — there’s more, asserts the Lown Institute in their approach to ranking America’s Best Hospitals in 2020. The Institute’s methodology for assessing what’s “best” addresses ten pillars. Several of these are the “stick-to-the-knitting” components of the Webster Dictionary definition of hospital work: patient outcomes, clinical outcomes, avoiding overuse, patient safety, and a recent focus, patient satisfaction. Community benefit has been part of a hospital’s life, especially in the not-for-profit world where hospitals must demonstrate goodwill generated for and provided in the neighborhoods in which

 

Faster Pace for Corporate Investments and Behavioral Health in COVID-Driven Digital Health Era

The pace of digital health investments quickened in the first half of 2020, based on Rock Health’s look at health-tech financing in mid-year. Digital health companies garnered $5.4 billion in the first half of the year, record-setting according to Rock Health. Underneath this number were very big deals, shown by the size of the blue bubbles in the first graphic from the report. Note that in H1 2020, the average deal size exceeded $25 mm. Among the largest deals valued at over $100 mm were ClassPass (raising $285 mm), in the business of virtual fitness classes;  Alto Pharmacy, a digital

 

Wear A Mask and Save 5% of US GDP: My Independence Day Holiday Wish

“And please…please…please wear a face covering,” Dr. Jerome Adams, the U.S. Surgeon General pleaded on June 30, 2020, during a speech to U.S. Public Health Workers. [You can fast forward to second #42 to hear Dr. Adams’ impassioned plea to his fellow Americans. s Wearing a mask or face covering reminds me of an early economics lesson from Adam Smith: that actions I take that are good for you can be good for me. “In addition to caring about our own well-being, we also naturally care about the well-being of others,” Ryan Patrick Hanley wrote in his assessment of Adam

 

U.S. Hospitals Will Lose $323 Billion in 2020 – Before Accounting for Growing COVID Cases

U.S. health systems are projected to lose $323 billion in 2020 due to declining inpatient and outpatient volumes caused by the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the “normal” hospital business. Hospitals racked up over $200 bn in losses between March and June 2020. according to the American Hospital Association’s report, Hospitals and Health Systems Continue to Face Unprecedented Financial Challenges Due to COVID-19. AHA suggests that the $323 bn loss figure may be underestimated, as growing coronavirus cases are emerging in certain states: as of this writing, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, Texas, and Utah among those states heating up.