A blog covering the health/care ecosystem and people.

Health literacy and, indeed, literacy across the many layers relevant for health (digital, medical, financial), is a challenge for people of all ages. The Institute for Healthcare Policy Innovation’s National Poll on Healthy Aging at the University of Michigan focused on people 50 and over in their latest study published this month: Health Literacy – How Well Can Older Adults Find, Understand, and Use Health Information. On the upside, 4 in 5 older people (50+) feel confident in being able to spot health mis-information, the chart from the Poll report clearly tells us. 20% of older U.S. health citizens are

The premium for employer-sponsored health plans grew by 6-7% between 2023 and 2024, according to the report on Employer Health Benefits 2024 Annual Survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation, KFF’s 26th annual study into U.S. companies’ spending on workers’ health care.                 In 2024 the average annual health insurance premium for family coverage is $25,572, split by 75% covered by the employer (just over $19,000) and 25% borne by the employee ($6,296), shown in the first chart from the report. The nearly $26K family premium is the average across all plan types in the

Beyond women’s health and abortion politics, most Americans are looking for more health care baked into the 2024 Elections, based on a new poll from Gallup in collaboration with West Health.           Two in three U.S. adults thought health care was not receiving enough attention during the 2024 Presidential campaign as of September 2024. This is a majority shared opinion for voters across the three party IDs in the U.S., shown in the first bar graph. The research polled 3,660 U.S. adults in September, about two-thirds before the presidential debate held September 10, and about one-third

Only 20% of U.S. adults have a positive view of the pharmaceutical industry, garnering the lowest positive vibes among Americans in Gallup’s latest survey on peoples’ opinions of industries in America. About 1 in 3 Americans feel positively about health care in the U.S., on par with publishing and the electric/gas industries — on the lower end of these findings.             By far, the top-perceived industry in the U.S. is agriculture and farming, taking the first spot with 64% of Americans’ positive views. Restaurants and the computer sector get 52% positives, although Gallup points out

“If the U.S. were sensible, weight management would be treated as a public health issue,” David Cutler writes in the JAMA Health Forum dated August 15, 2024. Dr. Cutler, distinguished economics professor at Harvard, talks about “the pathology of U.S. health care” citing the example of weight loss medications — in short, the uptake of GLP-1 drugs to address Type 2 diabetes first, and subsequently obesity.          Dr. Cutler notes that the price of these drugs in the U.S. “far exceeds” that of other countries: specifically, 9 times that of the prices in Germany and the Netherlands

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

Rising energy bills are confronting U.S. households (and indeed, health citizens in many parts of the world) due to extreme heat, PBS reported on 1st September. But the record heat waves in so much of the world is impacting both peoples’ fiscal and financial well-being along with physical health impacts, ranging from exacerbating chronic respiratory conditions to, literally, risks to lives.                     A recent letter to JAMA, published August 26, 2024, quantifies Trends of Heat-Related Deaths in the U.S., 1999-2023. The authors examined studies finding exposure to extreme heat associated with mortality,

“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

Women in the U.S. have lower life expectancy, greater risks of heart disease, and more likely to face medical bills and self-rationing due to costs, we learn in the latest look into Health Care for Women: How the U.S. Compares Internationally from The Commonwealth Fund.              The Fund identified four key conclusions in this global study: Mortality, shown in the first chart which illustrates women in the U.S. having the lowest life expectancy of 80 years versus women in other high-income countries; Health status, with women in the U.S. more likely to consume multiple prescription

People living in the U.S. continue to feel a “vibe-cession” malaise, based on the American Mindset July 2024 update from Dentsu’s Consumer Navigator research.                     Notwithstanding generally good news about the American macroeconomy — in terms of growth, downward ticking inflation, and expected interest rate relief come September from the Federal Reserve — one in two Americans still thinks the country is in a recession. And this context is important for consumer’s personal spending on health care, fitness, and wellness, because, as Dentsu puts it, “consumers think in terms of personal finances.” As

People have been undergoing their own human kind of digital transformations, turbocharged during the pandemic for many who never used Zoom or Amazon Prime or Uber. That consumer-borne digital transformation has shaped people as health consumers, many having used telehealth and appointment-scheduling online. And peoples’ relationships with pharmacies are also changing, with more health consumers finding greater satisfaction with their mail order pharmacy experiences than with moat retail brick and mortar chain drug stores, the latest J.D. Power 2024 U.S. Pharmacy Study found.                       It’s clear that mail order is

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

One of the few bright spots in consumer technology spending in the past couple of years of the U.S. economic “vibecession” has been the category of smartwatches. The Wall Street Journal recently talked, specifically, about the growing role of the Apple Watch for health care, gaining traction as a part of cardiologists’ and other physicians’ testing for and adoption of the wearable tech device for patients who are managing medical conditions.                     Data from CTA, the Consumer Technology Association, has been tracking such spending which I’ve often discussed here in Health Populi

Over one-half of people 50 years of age and older in the U.S. have felt financial strain in the past year, resulting in 1 in 2 folks cutting back on everyday expenses like groceries and gas. We learn that nearly one-half of people 50 and over say they’ve been impacted by inflation “a great deal” in Making Ends Meet: Financial Strain and Well-Being Among Older Adults, the latest report from the Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation’s National Poll on Healthy Aging based at the University of Michigan (my alma mater). The poll was conducted by NORC at the University

The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) was founded in 1945 by a group of scientists concerned about the atomic bomb — sharing a mission to focus on technology, science, and innovation to, in the Association’s words, “work toward a safer, more equitable, and more peaceful world.”           Nearly 80 years after the organization’s launch, the FAS is focusing on the growing role of artificial and augmented intelligence across the many areas that touch peoples’ lives — including health care and well-being. The FAS published a state-of-the-nation essay on June 27 on Improving Health Equity Through AI.

At least one-half of U.S. health care organizations have experienced a data breach, one-third in the last 3 years, according to Software Advice’s 2024 Healthcare Data Security Survey released in May 2024.               Of the health care organizations who experienced ransomware attacks, one-third did not recover patient data from the cyber-attackers, Software Advice learned. Clearly, cyberattacks are impacting patient care. And the growth of home care, hospital-to-home, and greater self-care are also increasing risks for cybersecurity. The growing adoption of digital technologies in healthcare, from the hospital to the doctor’s office to the home,

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

You would assume that most people over 50 would be worried about the financial future of Medicare to cover health care as those middle-aged Americans age. But a surprising two-thirds of young Americans between 18 and 29, and 7 in 10 between 30 and 39 years of age, are concerned that Medicare’s solvency will worsen leading to their not being able to receive Medicare when eligible to receive it, discovered in the 2024 Healthcare in America Report from West Health and Gallup. This year’s research focused on aging in America, exploring areas of U.S. health care system successes as well

Health care costs for an “average” person covered by an employer-sponsored PPO in the U.S. rose 6.7% between 2023 and 2024, according to the 2024 Milliman Medical Index. Milliman also calculated that the largest driver of cost increase in health care, accounting for nearly one-half of medical cost increases, was pharmacy, the cost of prescription drugs, which grew 13% in the year.             The big number this year is $32,066, which is the cost of that employer-sponsored PPO for a family of 4 in 2024. I’ve curated the chart of the MMI statistic for many

Health insurance plans make mainstream media news every week, whether coverage deals with the cost of a plan, the cost of out-of-network care, prior authorizations, or cybersecurity and ransomware attacks, among other front-page issues. This week, AHIP (the acronym for the industry association of America’s Health Insurance Plans) is convening in Las Vegas for its largest annual 2024 meeting. We expect at least 2,400 attendees registered for the meeting, and they’ll not just be representing the health insurance industry itself; folks will attend #AHIP2024 from other industry segments including pharmaceuticals, technology, hospitals and health systems, and the investment and financial services

The vast majority of older people (95%) want to “age in place” — that is, stay put in their homes and avoid moving into long-term care residences or elsewhere. One approach for enabling aging-in-place is peoples’ adoption of various technologies, a topic surveyed by U.S. News & World Report.                 In April 2024, U.S. News interviewed 1,500 U.S. adults ages 55 and over on their views toward technology and everyday life at home. The first graphic from U.S. News’ study report, published earlier this month, shows that older people identified six categories of

In the past year, the growth of prescription drug utilization and spending has much to do with the use of GLP-1 agonists to treat diabetes and obesity, along with immunology therapy, and lipid meds, along with specialty medicines now accounting for over half of spending — up from 49% in 2018. This update comes from The Use of Medicines in the U.S. 2024 from the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science. The annual report details trends in health services utilization, the use of prescription drugs, patient financing of those costs, the drivers underpinning the medicines spending, and an outlook to 2028.

Yesterday, the U.S. House Committee on Ways and Means passed six pieces of legislation that would bolster telehealth in the U.S. for the next two years, assuring several aspects of access for health citizens across the country. “One of our top priorities on this Committee is helping every American access health care in the community where they live, work, and raise a family,” Committee Chairman Jason Smith (R-Mo.) explained in his introductory statement. Being from Missouri, Chairman Smith is especially keen on the role virtual care and telehealth can play to expand access to the under-served in the U.S. “In rural

While people in the U.S. perceive a dramatic rise in mental health conditions among fellow health citizens growing over the past five years, people note barriers of cost, insufficient supply of providers, and stigma as barriers to getting care in the latest Gallup and West Health poll on the subject.               In West Health’s words, three-quarters of Americans feel that, “mental health takes a back seat to physical health” in the U.S. A key theme of the research found that Americans find that mental health is not treated as well as physical health in

Less than 50% of people living in 16 countries do not trust government, media, or NGOs to do what is right to address their health needs and concerns, based on the responses from over 15,000 people living in 16 countries whose opinions are captured in the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer’s Special Report on Trust and Health.           Edelman launched the 2024 Trust Barometer earlier this year during the Davos World Economic Forum, and today released this round of research focused on health. Globally (among health citizens in the 16 countries polled in the study), trust for

In the past few years, what event or innovation has had the metaphorical impact of hitting you upside the head and disrupted your best-laid plans in health care? A few such forces for me have been the COVID-19 pandemic, the emergence of Chat-GPT, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. That’s just three, and to be sure, there are several others that have compelled me to shift my mind-set about what I thought I knew-I-knew for my work with organizations spanning the health care ecosystem. I’m a long-time practitioner of scenario planning, thanks to the early education at the side of Ian

Since the introduction of GLP-1 drugs on the market, their use has split into two categories: for obesity and “recreationally,” according to the Chief Economist with UBS (formerly known as Union Bank of Switzerland). Paul Donovan, said economist, discusses The economics of getting thin in his regularly published comment blog.                   “These different uses have different economic consequences,” Donovan explains: Obese patients who use GLP-1s should become more productive employees, Donovan expects — less subject to prejudice, and less likely to be absent from work. While so-called recreational GLP-1 consumers may experience these

“First, do no harm” is a key M.O. in health care. The phrase “patient safety” summons up a list of common sources such as medication errors, surgical errors, health care-associated infections, diagnostic errors, among other adverse events and harms people experience in the course of receiving health care. While safety outcomes and health care organizations’ “safety cultures” are improving, there is evidence in the U.S. that people — both patients and the health care workforce — feel less safe, discussed in Safety in Healthcare 2024 from Press Ganey. “Safety is the foundation of healthcare. It anchors all experiences — for patients

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

On February 22, 2024, I went to a CVS Pharmacy-Inside-Target in my community to fill a prescription for benzonatate 200 mg capsules. I had caught a bad case of the flu the week before, and subsequently suffered a very long tail of a cough. That’s TMI for me to write about in the Health Populi blog, but this story has a current-events twist: the pharmacist could not electronically link with my insurance company to transact my payment. He tried a few work-flows, and ended up using a discount card which in the moment worked for us, and I paid the

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

In the U.S., national news media, Federal statistics, dozens of business leaders  and the Federal Reserve Bank have been talking about an historically positive American economy on a macro level. But among individual residents of the U.S., there is still a negative feeling about the economy in a personal context, revealed in the Kaiser Family Foundation Health Tracking Poll for February 2024.                I’ve selected three figures of data from the KFF’s Poll which make the point that in peoples’ negative feelings about the national economy, their personal feelings about medical costs rank high

For change agents in health care, one of our True North paradigms is the Quintuple Aim. The five pillars of the Quint Aim grew from 3 goals of the Triple Aim: to improve patient experience, to drive better health outcomes, and to lower per patient costs. The Quadruple Aim added the goal of bolstering clinicians’ well-being (to address burnout, stress and depression), leading to the addition of health equity as the fifth objective. That happened in 2021, in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic which shined a bright light on health disparities, inequities, and risks in peoples’ social determinants of

How financially vulnerable are people with medical debt in the U.S.? Significantly more, statistically speaking, we learn from the latest survey data revealed by the National Financial Capabilities Study (NFCS) from the FINRA Foundation. The Kaiser Family Foundation and Peterson Center on Healthcare analyzed the NFCS data through a consumer health care financial lens with a focus on medical debt.          Financial distress takes many forms, the first chart inventories. People with medical debt were most likely lack saving for a “rainy day” fund, feel they’re “just getting by” financially, feel their finances control their life, and

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

You’ve heard of food-as-medicine and exercise-as-medicine. Now we see the emergence of telecomms-as-medicine — or more specifically, a driver of health, access, and empowerment. Elevance Health, the health plan organization serving 117 million members, launched a program to channel mobile phones and data plans into the hands of some Medicaid plan enrollees, explained in the organization’s press release on the program. To implement this program and get connectivity into consumers’ hands and homes, Elevance Health is collaborating with several telecomms companies including Verizon, AT&T, Samsung, and T-Mobile. Funding is supported by the FCC’s Affordable Connectivity Program.        

The growing movement of health care to the home is evident by a growing list of point solutions featured at CES 2024. Digital health has been a fast-growing category of consumer-facing devices at CES for over a decade. But with the growing ubiquity of connectivity, cloud computing, sensors and this year AI “everywhere,” a person’s home as their health-hub is an increasingly practical scenario.               I track many categories of products at CES each year, and this year added into my portfolio the smart kitchen and smart bathroom. We’ve had components of these two

2023 was a pretty lackluster year for consumers’ spending on technology: inflation, concerns  about global instability, and general household economic ennui caused consumers to ration spending on most electronic gadgets last year. Enter a more cash-positive mood for many consumers keener in the new year to acquire updated and upgraded tech, from computer hardware to wearable tech for health, according to the forecast released by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) research team. The study results, announced on the first of two pre-conference Media Days, kicks off CES 2024 convening this week in Las Vegas. The bullish spending statistics reverse a two-year

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,

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

The cost of living ranks top in U.S. voters’ minds among many issues Americans are feeling and following in late 2023. A close second in line is affordability of health care, as consumers’ household budgets must make room for paying medical bills — with prescription drug costs also very important as a discussion topic for 2024 Presidential candidates, we learn from the latest KFF Health Tracking Poll published 1 December. The monthly study focused on U.S. voters’ top issues and perspectives on the health system and care approaching the new year of 2024. KFF fielded the study among 1,301 U.S.

Two-thirds of U.S. consumers say they can’t afford to pay their medical bills on-time, based on the 2023 Consumer Survey from Access One, a financial services company focused on healthcare payments.               The report’s title page asks the question, “What options do consumers really want for paying healthcare expenses?” The survey report responds to that question, finding out that nearly one-half of patients have taken some kind of action to reduce their medical expenses. Furthermore, one-third of consumers are not confident they could pay a medical bill of $500 or more. Access One fielded

“Businesses which have witnessed a rise in brand value…have all transcended their established category norms and play a more significant and meaningful role in society and consumers’ lives,” we learn in the Interbrand Best Global Brands 2023 report, subtitled, “How Iconic Brands Lead Across Arenas. Most brands stagnated or lost ground in terms of brand value in 2023, with average growth rate of 5.7% compared to 16% in 2022. But those who rose fast bucked the stagnation trend, and included the fastest risers Airbnb (growing brand value by 21,8%) and Microsoft (increasing in brand value by 14%, the highest growth rate

While there are barriers preventing health systems and care providers from adopting consumer-focused measures for patient experience, those who have deployed these metrics can provide solid role models for advancing consumer-centered care.             Welcome to Kaufman Hall’s eighth  annual study culminating in the 2023 State of the Healthcare Consumer Report. This year, the report’s subtitle “Measuring What Matters” speaks to the importance of achieving an ROI on consumer-facing investments while facing real, pragmatic headwinds such as cost and margin management and staffing pressures, among other forces that can stifle investments in new-new things.    

“Do personal health trackers belong in the doctor’s office?” Software Advice wondered. “Yes,” the company’s latest consumer survey found, details of which are discussed in a report published on their website. Unique to this study is the patient sample polled: Software Advice surveyed 876 patients in September 2023 to gauge their perspectives on wearable tech and health. Note that the patient sample was limited to consumers who had seen a health care provider in the past two years and who also owned and used a personal wearable health device such as an Apple Watch or Fitbit. Thus, the responses shared

The latest read from ONC, the Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT, tells a story about patients’ growing use of online portals, medical records, and smartphone apps to access personal health information. We now have solid evidence empowering us to disagree with Col, Nathan Jessup, the iconic character played by Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, who responded to Tom Cruise’s Lt. Kaffee’s demand for “the truth” as the villainous Colonel raged, “You can’t handle the truth.” But ONC data belies that: as it happens, patients can handle the truth, as we learn that 9 in 10

There is growing evidence on the connection between people’s financial health and their mental health, explored and explained in Understanding the Mental-Financial Health Connection, a study published by the Financial Health Network.             Keep that relationship in mind in the context of a new forecast from Kaiser Family Foundation estimate the 2023 cost for employer-sponsored insurance for a family to reach nearly $24,000 in 2023. That cost is a 7% increase over last year, and is expected to be split with companies covering $17K (about 70%) and employees about $6600 (roughly 30%). KFF heard that

Patients’ comfort in artificial intelligence is linked to familiarity with the technology, a consumer survey from GlobalData learned. Among patients unfamiliar with AI, 42% are uncomfortable, and another 50% feel neither comfortable nor uncomfortable with the technology. However, among patients familiar with AI, 60% feel comfortable with visiting a medical practice that uses AI. Welcome to the new health literacy challenge the health care sector will have to deal with, and soon: lack of patients’ awareness of AI, its promises and pitfalls.             “It is imperative to prioritize patient education regarding this technology,” Urte Jakimaviciute