A blog covering the health/care ecosystem and people.

Are women “seen?” And how do they see themselves compared with how companies see them — marketers, leaders, and any enterprise that’s trying to message and persuade women to calls-to-action?             If you are working to inspire, influence, or engage that portion of the world’s population who are women, then a new study from 8th-Day brand consultancy can inform your strategies. It’s titled Hidden Women: Unlocking brand growth by seeing the unseen, and it’s chock full of insights and lightbulb moments from which you can benefit. In full and delightful disclosure, the 8th-Day team are

In full transparency, I’ve been a fangirl of Kara Swisher since I first read her work with Walt Mossberg and Recode, coinciding with my own work on the early adoption of the Internet in health care. Today, Swisher is everywhere all-at-once, covering technology, politics, and now, seeking truths about the so-called longevity economy.             Swisher appeared with Nicolle Wallace on her podcast, The Best People, on 13th April, so I was keen to tune in. The conversation covered a lot of ground, and it was Swisher’s take on science and health that I was most

Going back to its roots, CVS Health announced plans to open 20 “apothecary-style” pharmacies around the U.S., the first of which was sited in Chicago’s West End.                The new brick-and-mortar stores will average 3,000 square feet, providing full-service pharmacies staffed by licensed pharmacists. “Pharmacists are among the most accessible and most trusted health care providers,” Len Shankman, EVP and President of Pharmacy and Consumer Wellness for CVS Health is quoted in the press release for the plans. This new footprint is meant to enable “pharmacy teams to continue to build relationships with patients

When the mainstream media food magazine Food & Wine devotes a long article to the concept of food-as-medicine, it calls to me….loudly. Here’s another proof-point for tying together public and individual health while boosting local economies.                   F&W featured Stacey Leasca’s essay, What Happens When Doctors Start Prescribing Food Instead of Pills?, online this month, and Stacey did her homework. One of Stacey’s go-to evidence-based resources for her column was the recently-released Rockefeller Foundation report, From Farm to FIM: The Economic Impact of Local Food is Medicine. The Foundation studied several local

From pre- and self-diagnosis of symptoms to prescription drug treatments and ongoing care, millions of U.S. consumers have used AI chatbots for health and wellness according to the consumer health adoption survey from Rock Health. The report was published in late March 2026, with AI-focused data from the consumer survey fielded in December 2025.              In just one year from 2024 to 2025, consumers’ use of AI chatbots for health information doubled from 16% of people to 32%. The most popular brand of AI for health information seeking was ChatGPT (owned by OpenAI, with whom

The announcements of consumer-focused AI for health are coming Fast and Furious. As we are coming off of the 2026 Oscars broadcast, it inspires me to quote another movie title, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. In the moment, it feels like consumer health-focused AI is indeed in a fast-and-furious launch phase. It’s time for me to provide an update on this fast-moving-consumer service, discussing the latest vendor announcements and the ongoing concerned embrace of AI among early adopting citizen-users of AI for health/care. For context, let’s start with long-time AI-medical expert Dr. Eric Topol’s view on the current state. Registering

The COVID-19 pandemic was a watershed era for people re-assessing and re-imagining their homes as hubs for health, healthcare, and well-being (as well as learning, exercising, and baking sourdough bread).                         This graphic comes from my book, Health Citizenship: How a Virus Opened Hearts and Minds, written in the midst of the pandemic based on consumers’ newly adopted behaviors during the #workfromhome and #stayhome epoch. We experienced the digital transformation of people through life and home-based work and education, a growing sense of DIY for things we could do

“When Weight Watchers dared to run an ad in 2015, it was likened to a record scratch,” AdAge noted in its preview of ads planned for broadcasting during Super Bowl LX. A decade+ later, healthcare and health-related promotions are part of the Big Game’s financial lifeblood, where a 30-second spot can cost $8 million according to AdMeter  And on the aesthetics/design front, some of the ads this year are downright edgy — entertainment-intended, but also educational in their own way. Take “Rich People Live Longer,” this year’s ad from Hims & Hers Health. The company advertised at last year’s game

People over 50 in America typically hold two thoughts in mind at once when it comes to AI: they’re optimistic and skeptical, depending on the “job” that AI could do, according to research from AARP explained in the report, Navigating the World of AI: Awareness, Attitudes, and How People Expect to Use It.       Topline, most people 50 and over have used AI in some way, with roughly 3 in 5 older Americans saying “I am a beginner” in using AI across age groups from 50 to 70+. Most older Americans are familiar with many terms in the

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

For well over a decade, wearable technologies have been developed for humans from head-to-toe — from forehead-worn bands to address stress and headaches to smart shoes with sensor-embedded soles that assess our gait and posture. In 2013, my CES coverage had a focus on “The Battle of the (Wrist)Bands.” This year, the #wearabletech category feels like a fierce competition for the human real estate of the finger — that is, a battle of the smart rings. Twelve years later, smartwatches are mainstream trackers for health embedded with sensors that are gaining clinical evidence for use in medical care well beyond

Increasingly, people are engaging more in health care decision making due to many factors impacting their personal medical choices — from the cost and access to health insurance to co-payments for prescription drugs and the supply of primary care doctors, more patients developed and exercised their health consumer muscles in 2025, For 2026, the health consumer muscle-building will grow as people will be re-shaped by macro market factors we are currently gleaning from forecasts looking into the new year: for personal finances, social issues, technology adoption, views on AI and privacy, and other issues. Here are some data points to

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

“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.

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.    

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),

“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

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

Most Americans, thinking as health consumers, believe that tariffs could impact peoples’ ability to pay for costly prescription drugs and be priced out of paying for check-ups and medical supplies, based on results from two studies on consumers’ views on tariffs and their health care from Ipsos and Q-Centrix.             Ipsos’s consumer survey found that younger consumers, people earning lower incomes, and folks living in the suburbs feel even more stressed about tariffs’ impact on medical care — along with more people identifying as Democrats or Independent voters.             With

Financial stress and anxiety have an ‘outsized’ negative impact on the well-being of women in America, compared to male counterparts, we learn in Health. Wealth, and Happiness – Helping to overcome roadblocks to women’s well-being, a report from the Guardian Life Insurance Company.                 This report is part of Guardian’s annual research program called Mind, Body, Wallet, which the company launched 14 years ago. The goal of Mind, Body. Wallet is to assess how health citizens define “well-being” in daily living, making the crucial connections between mental health (“Mind”), physical health (“Body”), and money

The pandemic era re-shaped consumers’ views on food as an input for health across all dimensions. We look back with affection for our local grocery stores and pharmacies which played leading roles as first responders f0r our health and, quite literally, the basic needs at the base of our personal hierarchies the way Maslow conceived them. As I tracked home-bound consumers’ behaviors from the start of COVID-19 in March 2020, I hunted-and-gathered data from Nielsen, Acosta, Circana, Gallup, Harris, and other sources of consumers @ retail. The DIY food-health concept, coined by Nielsen, was the build-up of our “pandemic pantries.”

When it comes to luxury goods, forget about that Rolex watch, a Louis Vuitton bag, or Porsche. The top luxury item among U.S. consumers in 2025 is time, and with many luxury goods, time is in short supply for most people. An important new report from Duckbill explores the Permission to Ask: Why Americans Need Help — And Why They Struggle to Get It.             The top-line finding gleaned through Duckbill’s survey of 2.069 U.S. consumers in early May 2025 was that 2 in 3 Americans are just trying to get through the day. This struggle

Across all U.S. voters, the so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” Act (BBB) is seen unfavorably by nearly a 2:1 margin. Underneath that top-line, Democrats, Independents, and non-MAGA Republicans oppose it, while MAGA supporters favor it. But favorability erodes when people hear about possible health impacts, we learn in the June 2025 Health Tracking Poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation. The details on views of the BBB Act are shown in the first bar chart, with overwhelming disfavor among Democrats and Independents, and majority unfavorability among non-MAGA GOP supporters.                 Next check into partisans’ lenses

“While children are the group that may be most impacted by the widespread deployment of generative AI, they are simultaneously the group least represented in decision-making processes relating to the design, development, deployment or governance of AI,” we learn in Understanding the Impacts of Generative AI Use on Children, research conducted by The Alan Turing Institute in partnership with the LEGO Group. But it’s the children who shared their perspectives who can teach adults about some potential positive and negative aspects of GenAI, and help inform us in managing downside risks. FYI, The Institute is headquartered in the British Library

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) was put into law in 1991. The first smartphone was launched by IBM the following year in 1992 known as the IBM Simon. Then Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007. Now in 2025, smartphones are ubiquitous, landlines more cut than connected, and texting is the way people communicate. But for many patients, caregivers, health plan members, and health citizens, whichever persona we are in our individual health care journeys at a point in time, the TCPA remains a barrier for people in the U.S. trying to connect with their health care.    

With women’s health and femtech investing in the spotlight in 2025, most of the focus has been on either women’s access to health care services (e.g., for abortion and prenatal/primary care) to start-ups focusing on fertility technology and benefits, along with growing awareness of the long-overlooked menopause market opportunity. Contraception? Not so visible. Of course, we welcomed the Opill to the over-the-counter medicines market last year with FDA approval of the switch to retail pharmacy and vending machine access.                     Now let me point you to a newfangled marketing campaign for

Most people in the U.S. say it’s harder to eat healthy given the cost of “healthy food,” we learn in the report on Americans on Healthy Food and Eating from the Pew Research Center, published 7 May 2025. With a view that healthy food is “too expensive,” it may feel like aspiring for it feels like luxury-good shopping, or being a patient prescribed a specialty (high-cost) drug.               The Pew team polled 5,123 U.S. adults’ perspectives on eating, fielded between 24 February and 2 March 2025. This report is timely as Secretary of Health and

When it comes to health, the words “fiscal” and “physical” are morphing as peoples’ economic feelings (the “fiscal”) are shaping physical and emotional health, we find in U.S. consumer data presented by John Dick, Founder and CEO of CivicScience.                 The Consumer Technology Association convened a special session with John, who painted a portrait of the U.S. consumer at a point in time — late April 2025 — reminding us more than once during the hourlong session that, “Everything is constantly changing.” One certainty that we can be sure of, in the dismal-scientist way

In the past year, most consumers in the U.S. have used virtual care, tracked at least one health metric digitally, and own a wearable or connected health device. Digital health has certainly gone mainstream across U.S. consumers, with varying utilization and motivation by generation, we learn in the report,   Screenagers to Silver Surfers: How each generation clicks with care from Rock Health.               To segment health consumers by age/generation, the RH team mined the firm’s 10th Consumer Adoption of Digital Health Survey which polled over 8,000 U.S. adults in 2024 on peoples’ perspectives

As Weight Watchers prepares to initiate bankruptcy proceedings, I file the news event under “thinking the unthinkable.”                     “Thinking about the unthinkable” is what Herman Kahn, a father of scenario planning, asked us to do when he pioneered the process. In this book, for Kahn, “the unthinkable” was thermonuclear war, and the year was 1962. The book was tag-lined as “must reading for an informed public” and in it, Kahn             I’ve been drawn back to this book lately because of a more intense workflow using

Americans’ financial health was already stressing consumers out leading up to Liberation Day, April 2nd, when President Trump announced tariffs on dozens of countries with whom the U.S. buys and sells goods. A new report from MoneyLion and Mastercard called Health is Wealth is well-timed for today’s Health Populi blog. The study was fielded by The Harris Poll online among 2,092 U.S. adults 18 and older between February 28 and March 4, 2025, so it was completed a month before the tariffs came to hit peoples’ 401(k) savings and employers’ company stock market caps.              

As Thomas Jefferson reminded us, travel makes us wiser…but less happy. And so it is when you confront a piece of art that makes you stop in your tracks, swim in it, and know what it’s saying in terms of what you know you know.                           Such was the case yesterday during a walking meeting through the Frist Art Museum in Nashville when I passed by this quilt, a multimedia work titled “Still Life in Need” by Lee Colvin, a local artist. This work was part of a

New data from the American Time Use Survey, research conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, shows that Americans now favor eating in-home compared with eating out at restaurants. Corroborating this shift is other data from the National Restaurant Association sharing that 74% of all restaurant traffic in 2023 came from “off premises” customers — that is, from takeout and delivery — up from 61% in the pre-COVID era. What does this mean for our health, well-being, and sense of community and connectivity?             I’m preparing a new talk to

On March 11, 2020, The World Health Organization announced that the coronavirus was deemed a pandemic. WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus asserted, “We have called every day for countries to take urgent and aggressive action. We have rung the alarm bell loud and clear.” Five years later, Edelman has fielded a survey to determine what some 4,000 health citizens living in 4 countries (Brazil, India, the UK, and the U.S.) are thinking and feeling about life after COVID-19 — and especially where their trust lies in institutions, fellow citizens, and future public health emergencies. I listened in on a discussion

People define health across many life-flows: physical health, mental health, social health, appearance (“how I look impacts how I feel”) and, to be sure, financial well-being. In tracking this last health factor for U.S. consumers, several pollsters are painting a picture of financially-stressed Americans as President Trump tallies his first six weeks into the job. The top-line of the studies is that the percent of people in America feeling financially wobbly has increased since the fourth quarter of 2024. I’ll review these studies in this post, and discuss several potential impacts we should keep in mind for peoples’ health and

The world would be a better place if we had more, and better quality sleep. That’s the hopeful conclusion from the fifth annual Global Sleep Survey from ResMed.               ResMed’s global reach with the sleeping public enabled the company to access the perspectives of over 30,000 respondents in 13 markets, finding that one in 3 people have trouble falling or staying asleep 3 or more times a week. We now live in “a world struggling with poor sleep” — “a world without rest,” ResMed coins our sleepless situation. The irony is that most people believe

The partisan divide in the U.S., exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, could set the stage for another public health emergency given eroding trust in institutions — especially in media, government, and public health officials. I base this sobering forecast on the latest study from the Pew Research Center which polled people in the U.S. about their pandemic-perspectives, detailed in the report 5 Years Later: America Looks Back at the Impact of COVID-19. Couple these findings with the recent dismissal of public health “disease detectors” working with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and what is currently termed a “quademic” (that

In the wake of the always-creative ads for Super Bowl and last Sunday’s LIX bout, game-watchers got to see a plethora of commercials dedicated to the annual event’s major features: food and game-day eating. Oh, and what’s turned out to be the most controversial commercial, the one on GLP-1s from Hims & Hers. In that vein, and converging with many news and policy events, I’m trend-weaving the latest insights into that most consumer-facing of the social determinants of health: food, and in particular, health consumers viewing and adopting food as part of their health and well-being moves. First, to the

Two polls from one poll source paint at once a bipartisan and bipolar picture of U.S. health citizens when it comes to health care issues versus health care institutions in America. The Kaiser Family Foundation has hit the 2025 health policy ground running in publishing the January 2025 Health Tracking Poll last week and a poll on health care trust and mis-information yesterday.                        First, the health tracking poll which finds some concurrence between Democrats and Republicans on several big issues facing Americans and various aspects of their health care. As