Nurses Continue to Reign #1 in Honesty and Ethics; Healthcare Pro’s 4 of Top 5 in Annual Gallup Poll
The topline of this year’s annual Gallup Poll into honesty and ethics of professions finds nurses sustaining their reign as the top trusted profession in America. But it’s also important to point out that four of the top five most ethical professions are people working on the front lines of health care: doctors (#3), pharmacists (#4) and dentists (#5). Engineers rank second this year after nurses, edging ahead of doctors and pharmacists who typically have ranked 2nd and 3rd each year in the past decade. One of these years, pharmacists’ reputation fell as the profession was associated with being a
“Digital Health Is An Ecosystem of Ecosystems” – CTA’s 2020 Trends to Watch Into the Data Age
In CTA’s 2020 Consumer Tech Forecast launched yesterday at Media Day 1 at CES, Steve Koenig VP of Research, said that, “digital health is an ecosystem of ecosystems.” Health, medical and wellness trends featured large in the forecast, which brought together key trends for 5G, robotics, voice tech, AR/VR/XR, and the next iteration of IoT — which Steve said will still be called “IoT,” but in this phase will morph into the “Intelligence of Things.” That speaks to Steve’s phrase, “ecosystem of ecosystems,” because that’s not just “digital” health — that’s now the true nature of health/care, and what is
Living in Digital Healthcare Times – Kicking off #DigitalHealthCES & #CES2020
Today is Day 1 of two Media Days at #CES2020 in Las Vegas, kicking off this manic week of the Consumer Electronics Show at the Mandalay Bay convention center. For several years, I’ve convened with journalists and industry analysts from around the world for these two days before the “official” opening of CES to hear the latest news from some of the largest tech-focused companies on Earth. Announcements come from across industry sector — from automotive and transportation, telecoms, consumer goods, entertainment, social media, travel, and retail…with platform technologies playing a role including but not limited to AI, AR/VR/XR (the
In 2020, PwC Expects Consumers to Grow DIY Healthcare Muscles As Medical Prices Increase
The new year will see a “looming tsunami” of high prices in healthcare, regulation trumping health reform, more business deals reshaping the health/care industry landscape, and patients growing do-it-yourself care muscles, according to Top health industry issues of 2020: Will digital start to show an ROI from the PwC Health Research Institute. I’ve looked forward to reviewing this annual report for the past few years, and always learn something new from PwC’s team of researchers who reach out to experts spanning the industry. In this 14th year of the publication, PwC polled executives from payers, providers, and pharma/life science organizations. Internally,
Medicare Members Are Health Consumers, Too – Our AHIP Talk About Aging, Digital Immigrants, and Personalizing Health/Care
As Boomers age, they’re adopting mobile and smart technology platforms that enable people to communicate with loved ones, manage retirement investment portfolios, ask Alexa to play Frank Sinatra’s greatest hits, and manage prescription refills from the local grocery store pharmacy. Last week, the Giant Eagle grocery chain was the first pharmacy retailer to offer a new medication management skill via Alexa. That program has the potential to change our Medicare members manage meds at home to ensure better adherence, supporting better health outcomes and personal feelings of efficacy and control. [As an aside, consumers really value pharmacies embedded in grocery
The Patient As Payor: Workers Covered by Employer Health Insurance Spend 11.5% of Household Incomes on Premiums and Deductibles
Workers covered by health insurance through their companies spend 11.5% of their household income on health insurance premiums and deductibles based on The Commonwealth Fund’s latest report on employee health care costs, Trends in Employer Health Coverage, 2008-2018: Higher Costs for Workers and Their Families. The topline of this study is that average annual growth in employer premiums rose faster between 2016 and 2017, by about 5% for both single and family plans. The bottom line for families is that workers’ premium payments grew faster than median incomes did over the ten years 2008 to 2018. Average deductibles also outpaced
Hospitals Suffer Decline in Consumer Satisfaction
While customer satisfaction with health insurance plans slightly increased between 2018 and 2019, patient satisfaction with hospitals fell in all three settings where care is delivered — inpatient, outpatient, and the emergency room, according to the 2018-2019 ACSI Finance, Insurance and Health Care Report. ACSI polls about 300,000 U.S. consumers each year to gauge satisfaction with over 400 companies in 46 industries. For historic trends, you can check out my coverage of the 2014 version of this study here in Health Populi. The 2019 ACSI report bundles finance/banks, insurance (property/casualty, life and health) and hospitals together in one document. Health
Art As Medicine – WHO Weaves the Evidence for Arts’ Role in Improving Health
“What’s the evidence on the role of the arts in improving health and well-being?” asks a report from the World Health Organization‘s Europe region team (WHO-Europe). There’s a lot of proof supporting arts-as-medicine, WHO details in this paper, which synthesizes research published in over 3,000 studies. The first chart illustrates the logic model that bridges arts to health in three segments: “Components” of arts programs, including but not limited to cognitive stimulation (e.g., learning a new arts skill such as painting, drawing or journaling), social interaction (e.g., participating in theatre), physical activity (e.g., dance), and evocation of emotion (e.g., listening
Will Technology Cure Americans’ Health Care System Ills? Considering Google and Ascension Health’s Data Deal
“Google’s ‘Project Nightingale’ Gathers Personal Health Data on Millions of Americans,” the Wall Street Journal reported in today’s paper and on the WSJ.com website. The story started with the scenario that, “Search giant is amassing health records from Ascension facilities in 21 states; patients not yet informed.” Here’s Ascension’s press release on the collaboration, described in the title as “healthcare transformation.” Note: this release was written after the Wall Street Journal published this story. And, according to the WSJ reporting, “Neither patients nor doctors have been notified. At least 150 Google employees already have access to much of the data
Great Expectations for Health Care: Patients Look for Consumer Experience and Trust in Salesforce’s Latest Research
On the demand side of U.S. health care economics, patients are now payors as health consumers with more financial skin in paying medical bills. As consumers, people have great expectations from the organizations on the supply side of health care — providers (hospitals and doctors), health insurance plans, pharma and medical device companies. But as payors, health consumers face challenges in getting care, so great expectations are met with frustration and eroding trust with the system, according to the latest Connected Healthcare Consumer report from Salesforce published today as the company announced expansion of their health cloud capabilities. This is
Most Consumers Are Interested in Using a Voice Assistant for Some Type of Health Care
While 75 million people in the U.S. have a smart speaker at home, only 1 in 13 Americans have used a voice assistant like Alexa or Google Assistant for health care. But over one-half of consumers would like to access a voice assistant for some aspect of their health care, according to a study from Orbita and Voicebot, Voice Assistant Consumer Adoption in Healthcare. The study polled 1,004 U.S. adults 18 and over in September 2019. In 2019, few health care providers have adopted voice assistants into their workflows. The report calls out one big barrier to early adoption especially
Making Health Care Better, from the N of 1 to the Public’s Health – Trend-Weaving Medecision Liberation 2019
Health and our health information are deeply personal. Changing health care and inspiring positive health behaviors is hard to do. But we must and we will, a group of inspiring and inspired people who work across the health/care ecosystem affirmed this week in Dallas at the conference of Medecision Liberation 2019. I was engaged at this conference to wear several hats — as a keynote speaker, a sort of “emcee,” and, finally, to trend-weave the many talks and discussions happening throughout the meeting. This post is my synthesis of the summary I delivered live at the end of the conference,
Listening to Osler Listening to the Patient – Liberating Health Care at Medecision Liberation 2019
“Listen to your patient; he is telling you the diagnosis,” Dr. William Osler is quoted to have said around the turn of the 20th century. Dr. Osler had been a strong advocate for the physician-patient conversation to inform the doctor’s diagnostic acumen and improve patient outcomes. This year is the centennial of Dr. Osler’s passing, so it’s especially timely that I introduce this post with his legendary assertion in the context of kicking off the 2019 Medecision Liberation conference. This meeting convenes the company’s clients, partners, and staff to share best practices, spark insights and learnings, and enable networking between
How a Razor Bolsters Health, Wellness and Love for Caregiving
The market for caregiving is growing and the business community has, finally, begun to pay attention. The Washington Post referred to this market as a “gold rush” to design smart shoes, custom razors and technology for the “over-65 crowd.” Caregiving in the U.S., the seminal report from AARP, estimated that 43,5 million adults in the U.S. had provided unpaid care to an adult or child in the past year, about one in five people being caregivers. Over half of caregivers are women, and are about 49 years of age on average. Caregivers spent over 24 hours a week providing care go
Patients Growing Health Consumer Muscles Expect Digital Services
Patients’ experiences with the health care industry fall short of their interactions with other industries — namely online retail, online banking and online travel, a new survey from Cedar, a payments company, learned. Survata conducted the study for Cedar among 1,607 online U.S. consumers age 18 and over in August and September 2019. These study respondents had also visited a doctor or hospital and paid a medical bill in the past year. One-third of these patients had a health care bill go to collections in the past year, according to Cedar’s 2019 U.S. Healthcare Consumer Experience Study. Among those people
The Hospital CFO in the Anxiety Economy – My Talk at Cerner’s Now/Next Conference
As patients have taken on more financial responsibility for first-dollar costs in high-deductible health plans and medical bills, hospitals and health care providers face growing fiscal pressures for late payments and bad debt. Those financial pressures are on both sides of the health care payment transaction, stressing patients-as-payors and health care financial managers alike. I’m speaking to health industry stakeholders on patients-as-payors at Cerner’s Now/Next conference today about the patient-as-payor, a person primed for engagement. That’s as in “Amazon-Primed,” which patients in their consumer lives now use as their retail experience benchmark. But consumers-as-patients don’t feel like health care today
The Promise of Telehealth for Older People – the U-M National Poll on Healthy Aging
Older people are re-framing their personal images and definitions of aging, from continuing to work past typical retirement age, Skyping and texting with grandchildren, and traveling to destinations well beyond the “snowbird” locales of Florida and Arizona to more active and often charitable/volunteer situations in developing economies. And so, too, are older folks re-imagining how and where their health care services could be delivered and consumed. Most people over 50 years of age are cautious but open to receiving health care virtually via telehealth platforms, according to the National Poll on Healthy Aging from my alma mater, the University of Michigan. U-M’s
Health @ Retail – Prelude to GMDC SelfCare Summit with Updates from Hims & Hers, GoodRx, Sam’s Club and Amazon Care
“We knew millions of people weren’t getting the care they needed — they were either too embarrassed to seek help or felt stuck in a system that was confusing and intimidating. Digital health has the potential to radically change the way people approach their wellness and, since launching in 2017, we’ve outpaced even our own expectations, delivering more than 1 million Hims & Hers products to our customers. In collaboration with highly-qualified doctors and healthcare providers, we’ve built a digital health platform that is changing the way people talk about and receive the care they need.” That’s a verbatim paragraph
Prelude to Health 2.0 2019: Thinking Consumers At the Center of Digital Health Transformation
“Digital transformation” is the corporate strategy flavor of the moment across industries, and the health are sector isn’t immune from the trend. As this 13th year of the annual Health 2.0 Conference kicks off this week, I’m focused on finding digital health innovations that engage people — consumers, caregivers, patients, health citizens all. This year’s conference will convene thought leaders across a range of themes, and as is the Health 2.0 modus operandi, live demo’s of new-new things. As Health 2.0 kicks off today in pre-conference sessions, there is useful context described in a new report from the American Hospital
Why Humana Joined CTA – The Pivot from “Health Insurance” to Behaving as a Health-Tech Start-Up
“Every company is a tech company,” Christopher Mimms asserted in the Wall Street Journal in December 2018. Connectivity, artificial intelligence, and automation are now competencies every company must master, Mimms explains. This ethos underpins Humana’s decision to join CTA, the Consumer Technology Association which hosts CES every January in Las Vegas. If you read this blog, you know one of the fastest-growing “aisles” at the annual conference is digital health. Humana joined up with CTA’s Health and Fitness Technology Division this month. Last year, Humana hired Heather Cox in the new post of Chief Digital Health and Analytics Officer, reporting directly
Health Consumers Expect Healthcare to be Digital (and Secure), Philips Future Health Index Finds
Health care system financing, delivery, and workflows widely vary across nations around the world. Philips surveyed health care professionals and consumers living in 15 countries, from North America to Asia, and found that these health systems share one over-arching objective: to provide quality care with improved experiences for both patients and healthcare professionals. Being Philips, what underpins that quality and experience is technology; Philips explored telehealth, AI, digital health records (DHRs), and other digital health tools that can engage patients. Philips published results from this global study in The Future Health Index 2019, themed “Transforming healthcare experiences, exploring the impact
Health Care Providers Grow Consumer-Facing Muscles Driven by Retail & Tech-Health Competition
As patients continue to morph into health care payers, they’re increasingly expecting value-for-money, transparency, and customer experiences that show respect, bolster trust, and deliver quality services. Is that so much to ask from health care providers? Sure is, as it turns out, based on this year’s annual report from Kaufman Hall, the 2019 State of Consumerism in Healthcare: The Bar is Rising. For several years, Kaufman Hall have developed an Index of healthcare consumerism based on several pillars that, together, gauge health care providers’ performance on consumer health engagement. Providers fall into one of four tiers, ranging from Tier 1
Talking “HealthConsuming” on the MM&M Podcast
Marc Iskowitz, Executive Editor of MM&M, warmly welcomed me to the Haymarket Media soundproof studio in New York City yesterday. We’d been trying to schedule meeting up to do a live podcast since February, and we finally got our mutual acts together on 6th August 2019. Here’s a link to the 30-minute conversation, where Marc combed through the over 500 endnotes from HealthConsuming‘s appendix to explore the patient as the new health care payor, the Amazon prime-ing of people, and prospects for social determinants of health to bolster medicines “beyond the pill.” https://www.pscp.tv/MMMnews/1eaJbvgovBYJX Thanks for listening — and if you
Telehealth Awareness, Access and Adoption: Updates from J.D. Power, the ATA and FAIR Health
When you think “J.D. Power,” your mind probably imagines reviews of automotive performance, retail shopping experiences, or perhaps even health insurance plan customer service. Expanding its report-card role in the health ecosystem. J.D. Power has undertaken a survey on consumer satisfaction with 31 telehealth providers across 15 measures, which will be published in November 2019. In advance of the full report, the organization released a summary on telehealth access and satisfaction, which I’ll discuss in this post. I’ll also weave in the latest insights from the ATA 2019 State of the States report updating legislative/regulatory telemedicine activity at the U.S.
A Portrait of the Health Consumer as Confused, Cost-Challenged, and Out of Control
Patients in the U.S. are confused, cost-challenged and lacking control, according to The Consumer Healthcare Paradox from Maestro Health, an employee health and benefits company. Data illustrating that “paradox” is shown in the second chart: while 78% percent of patients told Maestro Health their health care experience is positive, 69% feel they lack control over their patient journey. Quality health care in America is too expensive, 79% of consumers said. Furthermore, one in two U.S. patients had received a medical bill that was higher than they anticipated it would be. Finally, one in two U.S. patients said the quality of
The Growth of Emerging Consumer Electronics Categories Adds to Digital Health Platforms
Of the $401 billion that will flow through retailers for consumer technology products, many of the fastest-emerging categories will play a role as platforms for health and medical care at home and in wearable tech. This is my tea-leaf read from reviewing the projections in the report, U.S. Consumer Technology Sales and Forecasts, July 2019, from the Consumer Technology Association (CTA). [CTA is annual convener of CES, the world’s largest consumer electronics meet-up.] Along with artificial intelligence (AI) and fast 5G networking, the forecast also quantifies growth prospects for smart speakers, home robots, wireless earbuds, smartwatches. and in-vehicle technology —
Health Care and Consumers in 2030: A Profile from KPMG
A “one layered delivery network through which patients can move seamlessly as they age and their needs evolve” will be the new health care platform to meet patients’ demands by 2030, according to a forecast from KPMG’s Healthcare and Life Sciences Institute. In Healthcare 2030: The consumer at the center, the KPMG team explores the demographic shifts and market drivers that will challenge the health care industry in the current U.S. delivery and financing system. The lens on that 2030 future is a consumer-centric delivery model that KPMG believes will be a solution to dealing with a demographic divide between
On Amazon Prime Day, What Could Health Care Look Like?
Today is July 15, and my email in-box is flooded with all flavors of Amazon Prime’d stories in newsletters and product info from ecommerce sites — even those outside of Amazon from beauty retailers, electronics channels, and grocery stores. So I ask on what will probably be among the top ecommerce revenue generating days of all time: “What could health care look like when Amazon Prime’d?” I ask and answer this in my book, HealthConsuming, as chapter 3. For context, this chapter follows two that explain how patients in the U.S. have been morphing into health consumers based on how health
A Matter of Trust, Perception, Risk, and Uncertainty – The Big Issues Raised by the Acquisition of PatientsLikeMe and Other Patient Data Transactions
By Susannah Fox, Jane Sarasohn-Kahn and Lisa Suennen I’ve lived long enough to have learned The closer you get to the fire the more you get burned But that won’t happen to us Cause it’s always been a matter of trust A Matter of Trust, by Billy Joel If you’re in health care and don’t live under a rock, you have probably heard that United Health Group (UHG) has acquired PatientsLikeMe (PLM). After the announcement, there was a lot of sound and fury, some of which signified nothing, as the saying goes, and some which signified a lot.
Kroger Health Thinks Food is Medicine – Nutrition at the Grocery Store Via FMI’s Insights
In reading the July/August issue of Eating Well magazine this week, I came across this ad which I scanned for you to see yourself: “We believe in food as medicine.” Signed, Kroger Health. Here’s the introductory text in the full-page ad: “As Kroger Health, our vision is to help people live healthier lives. And now, more than ever, through our experts, innovation, and technology, we’re uniquely positioned to bring that vision to life,” the copy read. “We know food,” the text continued, as part of The Kroger Co. which is the largest grocery chain in the U.S. celebrating 135 years
IKEA Garners the Top Health & Wellness Award at Cannes Lions 2019 – the Expanding Health/Care Ecosystem
“Health is now everyone’s business,” Shaheed Peera, Executive Creative Director of Publicis LifeBrands, said this week at the 2019 Cannes Lions awards. Shaheed also led the Health & Wellness jury at Cannes Lions 2019, the mission of which is to, in the words of the award’s portal, “celebrate creativity for personal wellbeing.” The Grand Prix Lions award for Health & Wellness went to IKEA for the company’s ThisAbles campaign. ThisAbles is a project pioneered by IKEA’s team in Israel, looking to improve everyday living for people with special needs through well-designed IKEA products. IKEA collaborated with non-profit organizations to develop
Healthcare Just Got SMAC’ed – Accenture’s Post-Digital Era for Health
Social, mobile, analytics and the cloud now underpin the health care industry. We’ve been SMAC’ed, and Accenture’s Digital Health Tech Vision 2019 believes we’re in a post-digital era ripe with opportunity. Five trends comprise the Vision: DARQ Power, the acronym for Distributed ledger technology, Artificial intelligence (AI), extended Reality, and Quantum computing. Adopting these applications can help health care reduce costs, drive labor efficiency and support people-centered design and experience. Get to Know Me is the use of technology to develop and deepen relationships with people. As an example of this trend, Accenture points to Mindstrong which leverages AI and
Intent, Insiders/Outsiders and Insights — Disney Institute’s Women’s Leadership Summit
There are many forms of magic inspired by Disney, the company. There’s the obvious attraction, the Magic Kingdom, that was Walt’s original destination vision, “imagineered” in 1932. Then there are other kinds of magic. The one I’m deep into in the moment is inspiration, ideation, and “reimagineering” my own thinking about work, legacy, and social justice. I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to spend much of this week at the inaugural Disney Institute Women’s Leadership Summit. The Institute convened about 300 women (and a handful of brave “He-for-She” men keen on diversity) in Orlando to learn about and brainstorm
The Persistent Rural/Urban Broadband Gap Is Bad for Health
In the U.S., rural residents’ access to broadband at home continues to lag behind urban and suburban dwellers, the Pew Research Group noted in a May 2019 research note on Americans’ use of technology. The Pew survey explored Americans’ adoption of technology and found that rural dwellers are also less likely to have multiple devices than non-rural consumers. Across the four types of tech studied, it’s smartphones that top the list of penetration in rural areas (at 71%), closely followed by computers (desktop or laptop, with 69% adoption), broadband (at 63%) and tablets
Healthcare Providers’ Consumer Experience Gaps – Learnings from Kaufman Hall’s 2019 Index
Most U.S. healthcare providers are spending more time, effort and capital with an eye to engaging with patients-as-consumers, a trend quantified in the report, the 2019 State of Consumerism in Healthcare: The Bar is Rising from Kaufman Hall, summarizing results from this year’s healthcare consumerism index survey conducted among about 200 healthcare providers. “Legacy organizations will need premier-level consumer capabilities to compete in today’s increasingly consumer-centric environment,” Kaufman Hall recommends. Providers identified the key capability gaps for consumer-centric care as improving the consumer experience, offering a variety of facility-based access points, utilizing digital tools for health engagement, providing price transparency,
People Want to Flourish, Not Just Live – Speaking Health Politics to Real People
“How should we define ‘health?'” a 2011 BMJ article asked. The context for the question was that the 1948 World Health Organization definition of health — that health is, “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”– was not so useful in the 21st century. The authors, a global, multidisciplinary team from Europe, Canada and the U.S., asserted that by 2011, human health was marked less by infectious disease and more by non-communicable conditions that could be highly influenced, reversed and prevented through self-care by the individual and public health policy
How Consumers’ Belt-Tightening Could Impact Health/Care – Insights from Deloitte’s Retail Team
Over the ten years between 2007 and 2017, U.S. consumer spending for education, food and health care substantially grew, crowding out spending for other categories like transportation and housing. Furthermore, income disparity between wealthy Americans and people earning lower-incomes dramatically widened: between 2007-2017, income for high-income earners grew 1,305 percent more than lower-incomes. These two statistics set the kitchen table for spending in and beyond 2019, particularly for younger people living in America, considered in Deloitte’s report, The consumer is changing, but perhaps not how you think. The authors are part of Deloitte Consulting’s Retail team. The retail spending data
When Will Self-Service Come to Health Care?
At least one in three people who have tried out virtual health care have done so because they use technology in all aspects of life and want to do the same with their healthcare. This data point has informed my vision for self-care and the home as our health hub, bolstered in part through the research of Accenture from which this first graphic comes. A common theme at health care meetings these days is how and when health care will meet its Amazon, Apple, or Uber moment? Lately, one of my speaking topics is the “Amazon Prime-ing” of health consumers,
Assessing the GAO’s Report on Single-Payer Healthcare in America: Let’s Re-Imagine Workflow
Calls for universal health care, some under the banner of Medicare for All,” are growing among some policy makers and presidential candidates looking to run in 2020. As a response, the Chairman of the House Budget Committee in the U.S. Congress, Rep. John Yarmuth (D-Ky.), asked the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to develop a report outlining definitions and concepts for a single-payer health care system in the U.S. The result of this ask is the report, Key Design Components and Considerations for Establishing a Single-Payer Health Care System, published on 1st May by the CBO. The report provides
Health Consumers Are Now Amazon-Primed for Healthcare – HealthConsuming Explains, Part 2
As patients now assume the role of health consumer, they rationally expect retail-level experiences with greater first-dollar payment for health insurance, health care services and medical products like prescription drugs. Consumers know what good retail looks and feels like, and are focusing that experiential lens on health care, Aflac found when their Workforces Survey polled Americans on their desirable health insurance shopping experience. One in two people said it should feel, “like Amazon,” and another 20% of folks said, “like retail.” Chapter 3 of HealthConsuming is titled, “How Amazon Has Primed Health Consumers,” and explains this re-shaping of patient expectations.
Listen Up, Healthcare: Hear The Patient’s Voice!
Consider the voice of a patient before the advent of the Internet in the digital 1.0 world, and then the proliferation of social networks in v 2.0. One patient could talk with another over their proverbial neighborhood fence, a concerned parent at the PTA meeting with others dealing with a children’s health issue, or a recovering alcoholic testifying in person at an AA session. Today, the voice of the patient is magnified one-to-many, omnichannel and multi-platform — via video, blogs, podcasts, social networks, listservs….and, yes, still in live forums like AA meetings, church basements, Y-spaces, and the Frazzled Cafe meet-ups
Health/Care Everywhere – Re-Imagining Healthcare at ATA 2019
“ATA” is the new three-letter acronym for the American Telemedicine Association, meeting today through Tuesday at the Convention Center in New Orleans. Ann Mond Johnson assumed the helm of CEO of ATA in 2018, and she’s issued a call-to-action across the health/care ecosystem for a delivery system upgrade. Her interview here in HealthLeaders speaks to her vision, recognizing, “It’s just stunning that there’s such a lag between what is possible in telehealth and what is actually happening.” I’m so keen on telehealth, I’m personally participating in three sessions at #ATA19. On Monday 15th April (US Tax Day, which is relevant
Finding Healthy Food and Things At Amazon Go In Chicago
Health is everywhere, I find in my travels and in my community. I’m in Chicago at the Becker’s health care conference with VisitPay this week, and had the opportunity to take a walk around the corner from the Hyatt Regency to the Illinois Center to visit one of the few Amazon Go stores operating in the U.S. Here’s what I found in my search for all-things-healthy at retail. You cannot enter an Amazon Go store without downloading the app that’s freely available in your operating system’s appstores for Apple, Google and, yes, Amazon. The app was quick to download, but
Medical Costs Are Consuming Americans’ Financial Health
Spending on medical care costs crowded out other household spending for millions of Americans in 2018, based on The U.S. Healthcare Cost Crisis, a survey from West Health and Gallup. Gallup polled 3,537 U.S. adults 18 and over in January and February 2019. One in three Americans overall are concerned they won’t be able to pay for health care services or prescription drugs: that includes 35% of people who are insured, and 63% of those who do not have insurance. Americans borrowed $88 billion in 2018 to pay for health care spending, West Health and Gallup estimated. 27 million Americans
In the U.S., Patients Consider Costs and Insurance Essential to Their Overall Health Experience
Patients in the U.S. assume the role of payor when they are enrolled in high-deductible health plans. People are also the payor when dealing with paying greater co-payments for prescription drugs, especially as new therapeutic innovations come out of pipelines into commercial markets bearing six-digit prices for oncology and other categories. For mainstream Americans, “the math doesn’t add up” for paying medical bills out of median household budgets, based on the calculations in the 2019 VisitPay Report. Given a $60K median U.S. income and average monthly mortgage and auto payments, there’s not much consumer margin to cover food, utilities, petrol,
Isn’t It Eyeconic? Vision Care in the Evolving Health Care Ecosystem
The vision/optical industry is one piece of the health/care ecosystem, but the segment has not been as directly impacted by patients’ new consumer muscles until just about now. It feels like the vision industry is at an inflection point at this moment, I intuited during yesterday’s convening of Decoding the Consumer: The new science of customer behavior, the theme of the 13th annual global leadership summit hosted by Vision Monday, a program of Jobson Medical Information which is part of the WebMD family. I was grateful to have an opportunity to share my views with attendees on the vision patient as
Can AI Make Healthcare Human Again? Dr. Topol Says “Yes”
“The Fourth Industrial Age,” Dr. Abraham Verghese writes, “has great potential to help, but also to harm, to exaggerate the profound gap that already exists between those who have much and those who have less each passing year.” Dr. Verghese asserts this in his forward to Deep Medicine, Dr. Eric Topol’s latest work which explores the promise of artificial intelligence (AI), Big Data, and robotics — three legs of the Fourth Industrial Age stool. [If you don’t know the work of Dr. Verghese, and since you’re reading the Health Populi blog, you must get to know Dr. V now. Your
Most Americans Across Party ID Favor U.S. Government Negotiation to Lower Rx Drug Costs
There’s little Americans, by political party, agree upon in 2019. One of the only issues bringing people together in the U.S. is prescription drug prices — that they’re too high, that the Federal government should negotiate to lower costs for Medicare enrollees, and that out-of-pocket costs for drugs should be limited. The Kaiser Family Foundation has been tracking this topic for a few years, and this month, their March 2019 Health Tracking Poll shows vast majorities of Democrats, Independents and Republicans all share these sentiments. It’s not that patients who take prescription drugs don’t appreciate them – most (58%) say medicines
Digital Transformation Is The New Mantra But Can’t Happen Without Access To Connectivity
As more of our “things” get digitally connected, there’s an unanswered question about how our connected lives impact human life and health. A new report from the OECD asks and answers: How’s Life in the Digital Age? Opportunities and Risks of the Digital Transformation for People’s Well-being. This research is part of OECD’s ongoing series asking the Big Question, “How’s Life?” A prevailing current mantra in work and daily living is “digital transformation.” The OECD broadly defined the phrase in their 2017 paper on the topic as follows: Mobility, cloud computing, the Internet of things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI) and big
Time To Travel And Wait In Health Care: The Opportunity For Self-Care At Home
What industry compels its “consumers” to wait longer and travel further for services more than any other in a person’s daily life? That would be health care, a report from Altarum notes. People travel further and wait longer for medical services than for veterinary care (second in this line-up), auto repair, banking, and household services. The annual opportunity cost for travel and wait time in health care is $89 billion, Altarum estimated. For the average person, that translates to 34 minutes of travel time and 11 minutes waiting time at the provider’s office. In terms of personal opportunity costs, Altarum gauged the
Cost and Convenience Underpin Patient Demands As Health Consumers
Across generations, from younger to older patients, cost, transparency and convenience drive consumer satisfaction, Accenture’s latest health consumer survey found. I had the opportunity to brainstorm the study’s findings in real-time on the day of survey launch, 12 February, with Dr. Kaveh Safavi, Brian Kalis, and Jenn Francis at HIMSS19. Our starting point was the tipping-point statistic that over 50% of people in the U.S. have chosen to use a non-traditional health care setting. Those non-traditional sites of care include walk-in and retail clinics, outpatient surgery centers, virtual health (whether on the phone, on video or via mobile apps), on-demand services,
Open Table for Health: Patients Are Online For Health Search and Physician Reviews
Seeking health information online along with researching other patients’ perspectives on doctors are now as common as booking dinner reservations and reading restaurant reviews, based on Rock Health’s latest health consumer survey, Beyond Wellness for the Healthy: Digital Health Consumer Adoption 2018. Rock Health has gauged consumes’ digital health adoption fo a few years, showing year-on-year growth for “Googling” health information, seeking peer patients’ physician and hospital reviews, tracking activity, donning wearable tech, and engaging in live telehealth consultations with providers, as the first chart shows. The growth of tracking and wearable tech is moving toward more medical applications beyond fitness
“Telehealth is a digital distribution channel for health care” – catching up with Roy Schoenberg, President and CEO of American Well
Ten years ago, two brothers, physicians both, started up a telemedicine company called American Well. They launched their service first in Hawaii, where long distances and remote island living challenged the supply and demand sides of health care providers and patients alike. A decade later, I sat down for a “what’s new?” chat with Roy Schoenberg, American Well President and CEO. In full transparency, I enjoy and appreciate the opportunity to meet with Roy (or very occasionally Ido, the co-founding brother-other-half) every year at HIMSS and sometimes at CES. In our face-to-face brainstorm this week, we covered a wide range
HIMSS 2019: The Mainstreaming of Health IT, from Jim Cramer to Opioid Risk Scores
On January 10, 2019, Jim Cramer of CNBC’s Mad Money recommended that Apple buy Epic, a market leader in EHRs. At that moment in the Twitterverse, it occurred to me that health IT as a consumer-facing industry was beginning to mainstream in America. Cramer’s pronouncement led to a tweetstorm where hundreds of tweeters in and outside of health/care talked back and with Cramer. A few of my favorite comments were: “Jim Cramer needs a crash course in FHIR standards” from the wonkier section of peanut gallery. “They are not even in the same universe” among people dissing the idea in
The Expectation Gap Between What Patients Want Vs What They Get
Talk to me, patients are demanding in unison. Most health consumers expect providers to communicate about routine health care and prevention; this is especially true among those patients trying to manage chronic conditions we learn from 10 Ways to Fulfill Patients’ Communication Wish List, a report based on a consumer survey from West, the communications and network infrastructure company. Four in five patients say that talking to “me” means they want personalized recommendations to their unique needs – but only one-third of patients say they’re getting that level of service from their healthcare providers. Most health consumers expect providers to communicate about
Care Gets Personal at Philips for Parents and Babies
Our homes should nurture our health. In addition to nutrition and good food, positive relationships, clean air and water, and the basic needs that bolster whole health, technology is playing a growing role to help us manage health at home. At CES 2019, I spent time with Roy Jakobs, Chief Business Leader of Personal Health with Philips, to discuss the company’s evolving portfolio of products that help fulfill the mission to support people across their own continuum of health. Following CES, I wanted to further dive into one part of the portfolio very important to family health at home: the
Consumers’ and Physicians’ Growing Embrace of Digital Health via PwC
Most consumers would be willing to try an FDA-approved app or online to treat a medical condition, as well as receiving hospital care at home if would be less costly. We’ve reached an inflection point on the demand side among consumers for digital health options, PwC suggests in their report on the New Health Economy coming of age. The report outlines health/care industry issues for 2019, with a strong focus on digital health. Whether a menu of care options including virtual health to access specialists across the U.S., post-hospital virtual visits, or hospital care at-home, a majority of Americans supports
What If Marie Kondo Reorganized Health Care in the U.S.?
Have you read the life changing magic of tidying up, or Spark Joy, books by Marie Kondo? Her new Netflix series, Tidying Up with Marie Kondo debuted on January 1, and has enjoyed passionate early viewership by consumers in America who are among the world’s major hoarders. If you opened any pop culture magazine or newspaper in the past week, you probably saw the results of a PR blitz promoting KonMari, the trademarked name for Marie’s clean-out method. As an example, the Wall Street Journal discussed the phenomenon in Ben Zimmer’s profile, “A Guru of Organizing Becomes A Verb” published this weekend
From Yorkshire Lad to Global Design for Health: A Profile of Sean Carney of Philips
Have you heard the story about a boy born in Yorkshire, England, who studies art in Birmingham, finds his way to Finland to work with design maestro Alvar Aalto, and then crafts a printer that Steve Jobs loved? I have, at CES 2019, when I sat down with Sean Carney, Chief Designer at Philips. It’s well-known that Philips has been firmly focused on health and health care, covering both clinical/professional healthcare as well as personal health for self-care. What you may not know is that underpinning the company’s innovations is a major commitment to all aspects of design. Design is embedded
A Smarter Home for Healthy Living at CES 2019….and a nod to Microsoft
Health begins at home. I found evidence for that, beyond my own N of 1 understanding, in a research article published in the UK in 2000 by Lyn Harrison and Frances Heywood. Lyn and Frances tested three assumptions that they believed linked housing and health: that housing contributes to health; that housing is not routinely included in health or social planning;’ and that the potential contribution of primary care is wasted. Their conclusion: that the housing-health link was not receiving the recognition that connection needs. Nearly two decades later, that housing-health link still isn’t universally embraced by health care stakeholders. But
The Caveats for Health/Care at CES 2019
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, a “caveat” is, “a warning to consider something before doing anything more.” It is fitting that CES is held in Las Vegas, land of high risk and, with a lot of luck, reward. With that theme in mind, I depart LAS airport tonight on an aptly-named red-eye flight back home after spending an entire week here. I’m pondering not what I saw — some of which I covered daily over the past week — but what I didn’t see. Consider these the caveats for health/care at #CES2019. In no particular order… Where was the Chairman of
It’s Not All About Pink for Women’s Tech at CES 2019
This is not a watch. Well, not just a watch. It can track heart rate. And it’s not even pink. Well, rose gold, perhaps. One of the benefits about being a woman attending CES is that there are no lines in the loos. The men’s rooms, however, are, shall we say, over-subscribed due to the big disparity between the number of male attendees versus females. Clearly, women are under-represented in technology companies at all levels, as the ladies’ room observation and many other more statistical reports recognize. But I’ve good news to report on the product front about women-focused consumer
The Consumer as Payor – Retail Health at CES 2019
All health/care is retail now in America. I say this as most people in the U.S. who have health insurance must take on a deductible of some amount, which compels that insured individual to spend the first dollar on medical services up until they meet their financial commitment. At that point, health insurance kicks in, and then the insured may have to spend additional funds on co-payments for general medicines and services, and coinsurance for specialty drugs like injectables and high-cost new therapies. The patient is a consumer is a payor, I asserted today during my talk on the expanding
Shelly Palmer De-Hypes CES 2019 & Has Lessons for Health/Care
I had the pleasure once again of attending Shelly Palmer’s annual kick-off breakfast where he level-sets our expectations for CES two hours before the tech halls open. Shelly is a consumer tech expert and leads the Palmer Group; comments on Fox 5 in NYC, CNN, and CNBC; writes a weekly column in Advertising Age; composes music; and he’s a Renaissance Man who’s a generous sharer of knowledge with a great sense of humor and humanity. Shelly is one of my trusted touchpoints for all-things-consumer-tech. His message at the start of #CES2019: this year, the show is about connectivity and partnership.
Heart Health at #CES2019 – Food and Tech as Medicine
Self-care is the new health care as patients, now consumers at greater financial risk for medical spending, are learning. At #CES2019, I’m on the lookout for digital technologies that can help people adopt and sustain healthy behaviors that can help consumers save money on medical care and enhance quality of life-years. This week’s heart-and-food tech announcements at #CES2019 coincide with an FDA recall on a popular drug prescribed to treat hypertension (high blood pressure). Using food and tech as medicine can help people avoid going on medications like statins and others for heart health. An important example of this self-care
What #CES2019 5 Tech Trends to Watch Mean for Health/Care
As #CES2019 kicks off in Las Vegas with today’s first Media Day, the Consumer Technology Association presented its forecast on the 5 Technology Trends to Watch in 2019 — and they all play into health, wellness, and medical care. The five trends are: Artificial Intelligence on the Rise Envisioning the Smart Home of the Future Digital Health Tech Empowers Patients Esports and Sports Technology, and Smart Cities Promote Resilience. Here are how these five mega-trends can bolster our health and healthcare products and services over the next decade. AI is indeed on-the-rise in healthcare: as I have begun planning my agenda for
Costs, Consumerism, Cyber and Care, Everywhere – The 2019 Health Populi TrendCast
Today is Boxing Day and St. Stephens Day for people who celebrate Christmas, so I share this post as a holiday gift with well-wishes for you and those you love. The tea leaves have been brewing here at THINK-Health as we prepared our 2019 forecast at the convergence of consumers, health, and technology. Here’s our trend-weaving of 4 C’s for 2019: costs, consumerism, cyber and care, everywhere… Health care costs will continue to be a mainstream pocketbook issue for patients and caregivers, with consequences for payors, suppliers and ultimately, policymakers. Legislators inside the DC Beltway will be challenged by the
Retail Health Ends 2018 With Big Plans for 2019
As the CVS + Aetna merger crosses its last regulatory hurdle at the close of 2018, we enter 2019 facing a fast-growing and -morphing retail health landscape. I brainstormed retail health yesterday with Patrick Freuler, CEO of Audicus (developer of hearing aids sold direct-to-consumer over-the-counter) and Shai Gozani, CEO of NeuroMetrix, maker of the Quell device for pain management. The three of us will be on a panel addressing retail health disruption at CES 2019 on 9th January 2019 at the Digital Health Summit. I explained to Shai what I’m going to say in my talk about retail health at
JWT’s Future 100 Tells Us Tomorrow Is All About Health
From culture to travel, food and drink to retail and beauty, health will be baked into consumer goods and experiences in 2019. Welcome to The Future 100: 2019 from The Innovation Group at JWT. In the 100 emerging trends across ten categories, the future is clearly health-driven, according to the tea-leaf readers at JWT.a Health is all over, Culture Tech and innovation Travel and hospitality Brands and marketing Food and drink Beauty Retail Luxury Health (as a category itself) Lifestyle. I’ve mined this report in previous years – you can review my findings from the 2017 report here in the Health
Consumers Want Help With Health: Can Healthcare Providers Supply That Demand?
Among people who have health insurance, managing the costs of their medical care doesn’t rank as a top frustration. Instead, attending to health and wellbeing, staying true to an exercise regime, maintaining good nutrition, and managing stress top U.S. consumers’ frustrations — above managing the costs of care not covered by insurance. And maintaining good mental health and staying on-track with health goals come close to managing uncovered costs, Oliver Wyman’s 2018 consumer survey learned. These and other important health consumer insights are revealed in the firm’s latest report, Waiting for Consumers – The Oliver Wyman 2018 Consumer Survey of US
Koen Kas, the Gardener of Health Tech Delights
The future of healthcare is not about being sick, Prof. Dr. Koen Kas believes. Having spent many years in life sciences in both research and as an entrepreneur, Koen now knows that getting and staying healthy isn’t about just developing medicines and med-tech: optimally, health requires a tincture of delight, Koen advises in his breakthrough, innovative book, Your Guide to Delight. Healthcare must go beyond traditional user-centered design, Koen’s experience has shown, and aspire toward design-to-delight. The concept of “delight” in healthcare, such as we experience in hospitality, grocery stores, and entertainment, is elusive. I’ve observed this, too, in my
On World Food Day 2018, Imagine A Chef Cooking for Patients
Today, October 16, is World Food Day. At Health Populi and THINK-Health, we celebrate the birthday of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), allied with the United Nations. FAO was founded to address malnutrition and bolster a sustainable, healthy food supply for people. World Food Day 2018 has four objectives: Don’t waste food Produce more food with fewer resources Advocate for #ZeroHunger by 2030, and, Adopt a healthier, more sustainable diet. All four of these pillars play a role in health, but I’ll focus today on the fourth: the role of food as a major social determinant of health. Hunger
CVS + Aetna: Inflection Point in US Healthcare, Merger Approved Update
CVS Health’s acquisition of Aetna was approved this week by U.S. Federal regulators after months of scrutinizing the antitrust-size-market control implications of the deal. I wrote this post on the deal as an inflection point in American healthcare on 3rd December 2017 when CVS and Aetna announced their marriage intentions. This post updates my initial thoughts on the deal, given the morphing US healthcare market on both the traditional health services front and fast-evolving retail health environment. The nation’s largest retail pharmacy chain signed a deal to combine with one of the top three health insurance companies. The deal
Open Source Health Care Will Liberate Patients
Information is power in the hands of people. When it’s open in the sunshine, it empowers people — whether doctors, patients, researchers, Presidents, teachers, students, Everyday People. Welcome to the era of Open Source Healthcare, not only the “about time” for patients to own their health, but for the launch of a new publication that will support and continue to evolve the concept. It’s really a movement that’s already in process. Let’s go back to some definitions and healthcare basics to understand just why Open Source Healthcare is already a thing. When information access is uneven, it’s considered
How MedModular Fits Into the New Lower-Cost, High-Quality, Consumer-Enchanted Healthcare World
In American health economics, there’s a demand side and a supply side. On the demand side, we’ve done a poor job trying to nudge patients and consumers toward rational economic decision making, lacking transparency, information symmetry, and basic health literacy. On the supply side, we’ve engaged in a medical arms race allocating capital resources to shinier and shinier new things, often without cost-benefit rationale or clinical evidence. On that supply side, though, I met up with an innovation that can help to bend the capital cost curve of how we envision and build new hospitals and clinics. This week, I
Sicker Consumers Are More Willing to Share Health Data
People dealing with chronic conditions are keener to share personally-generated data than people that don’t have a chronic disease, Deloitte’s 2018 Survey of U.S> Health Care Consumers learned. This and other insights about the patient journey are published in Inside the patient journey, a report from Deloitte that assesses three key touch points for consumer health engagement. These three patient journey milestones are searching for care, using new channels of care, and tracking and sharing health data, Deloitte maps. What drives people to engage on their patient journeys has a lot more to do with practical matters of care like convenience,
The Health Consumer Seeks Fresh, Free-From and…Turmeric
The impact of health and wellness is on most consumers’ minds, Nielsen’s consumer research has found. Sarah Schmansky, Nielsen’s strategy leader for health, wellness and “fresh,” moderated a panel at the GMDC Health-Beauty-Wellness Conference in Orlando today that brainstormed how consumers are shopping for health. Underneath that “how” is more than the next-best-me-too-product for allergy or acne. It’s about efficacy of the product at the core, but bundled with social responsibility and sustainability, informative packaging, transparency of ingredients, and education that empowers the individual. “Self-care is the driver of growth,” Sarah began the discussion. But these needs under the self-care umbrella
Consumers Changing the Channel on Where They Shop for Health
Consumers who have long purchased over-the-counter medicines, anti-dandruff shampoo, whitening toothpaste, and cosmetics-with-benefits at food, drug and mass merchant retailers are switching to other places to shop for health, new data from AT Kearney and GMDC have found. The two organizations have collaborated to launch a new benchmarking study into health-beauty-wellness (HBW) sales, launched this weekend at the GMDC HBW Conference in Orlando. Overall, 2017 to 2018 year-on-year, HBW sales were flat-to-no growth, notwithstanding the consumer and influencer buzz around the categories. This study uncovered some very important trends underneath the macro numbers that tell a story
Retail Tomorrow, Today: A Smart Grocery Cart and Digital Samples For Paleo-Eating Moms
In our Amazon-Primed world, the future of retail is not ten years from now; it’s “tomorrow.” So GMDC, the association of retailers and brands who supply them, has formed a program called Retail Tomorrow to turbocharge the supply side with consumers who are already demanding convenience, immediate (or “soon”) gratification, and health where she/he “is.” That’s personalization, and that’s where retail health can and is making a difference in Everyday Peoples’ lives. In our DIY culture, we’re pumping our own petrol, making our own airline and hospitality reservations (from Expedia to Airbnb), trading stocks online, and cooking at home enabled by
Self-Care is Healthcare for Everyday People
Patients are the new healthcare payors, and as such, taking on the role of health consumers. In fact, health and wellness consumers have existed since a person purchased the first toothpaste, aspirin, heating pad, and moisturizing cream at retail. Or consulted with their neighborhood herbalista, homeopathic practitioner, therapeutic masseuse, or skin aesthetician. Today, the health and wellness consumer can DIY all of these things at home through a huge array of products available in pharmacies, supermarkets, Big Box stores, cosmetic superstores, convenience and dollar stores, and other retail channels – increasingly, online (THINK, of course, of Amazon — more on
Health Il-Literacy Costs
The complexity of the U.S. healthcare system erodes Americans’ health literacy, Accenture asserts in their report, The Hidden Cost of Healthcare System Complexity. And that complexity costs, Accenture calculated, to the tune of nearly $5 billion in administrative cost burden to payors. Accenture developed a healthcare system literacy index to quantify the relationship between peoples’ understanding of how health insurance works and what a lack of understanding can cost the system. The index looks at consumer comprehension of health insurance terms like premium, deductible, copayment, coinsurance, out-of-pocket
Pharmacies Continue to Earn Consumer-Love
Among industries that consumers frequent, one continues to delight people more than most: pharmacies. J.D. Power’s 2018 ratings on U.S. pharmacies finds that consumers do indeed still love their pharmacies after ten years of rating customer satisfaction with brick-and-mortar and mail order channels. “U.S. consumers love their pharmacies,” J.D. Power asserts in its first study finding. In terms of total points across all pharmacies, Wegmans pharmacy was the overall top-ranked Rx retail channel with a total ranking of 906 out of 1,000 points. J.D. Power evaluated four categories of pharmacy: Brick-and-mortar chain drug stores, ranking Good Neighbor Pharmacy number one.
Going Digital for Health Is a New-Normal for Consumers
Using digital health tech is a new normal for U.S. consumers, including Seniors, found in the 2018 digital health consumer survey from Deloitte. The title of the report, “Consumers are on board with virtual health options,” summarizes the bullish outlook for telehealth. That’s the consumer-demand side of the equation. But the tagline begs the supply side question: “Can the health care system deliver?” For a decade or longer, we’ve noted the slow uptake of telehealth and digital health tools among healthcare providers. But the consumer pressures, along with evidence-based self-service options for health – both for “care” and for wellness,
The Top Pain Point in the Healthcare Consumer Experience is Money
Beyond the physical and emotional pain that people experience when they become a patient, in the U.S. that person becomes a consumer bearing expenses and financial pain, as well. 98% of Americans rank paying their medical bills is an important pain point in their patient journey, according to Embracing consumerism: Driving customer engagement in the healthcare financial journey, from Experian Health. Experian is best known as the consumer credit reporting agency; Experian Health works with healthcare providers on revenue cycle management, patient identity, and care management, so the company has experience with patient finance and medical expense sticker shock. In the
Surprise, Surprise: Most Americans Have Faced a “Surprise” Medical Bill
Most Americans have been surprised by a medical bill, a NORC AmeriSpeak survey found. Who’s responsible? Nearly all Americans (86% net responsible) first blame health insurance companies, followed by hospitals (82%). Fewer U.S. patients blamed doctors and pharmacies, although a majority of consumers still put responsibility for surprise healthcare bills on them (71% and 64% net). Most of the surprise bills were for charges associated with a physician’s service or lab test. Most surprise charges were not due to the service being excluded from a health plans provider network. The poll was conducted among 1,002 U.S. adults 18 and over
Best Buy Bets on AgingTech in the Expanding Retail Health Ecosystem
With the acquisition of GreatCall, a mature player in the aging-tech space, Best Buy is doubling down on consumer health technology@retail. This week at Best Buy. the electronics retailer, it’s out with CDs and in with technology for aging at home. The company announced that it would buy GreatCall for $800 million. A snippet from the announcement from Best Buy’s press release is shown in the first diagram, noting that GreatCall’s membership is approaching 1 million subscribers who use mobile phones and connected devices, “providing peace of mind to their loved ones.” Beyond the obvious “falling and I can’t get
Healthcare’s Profits Will Be Dramatically Redistributed as Care Shifts to Consumers: Accenture
All sectors who are stakeholders in the healthcare ecosystem aren’t created equal, Accenture explains in their report, Healthcare’s future winners and losers. Observing the influx of new flavors of entrants like Amazon and Google, start-ups like Iora Health, Oscar and FetchMD, begs the question: how will legacy healthcare system players fare? Who will survive, and what will be the success factors that bolster long-term viability? To answer that question, Accenture points to three market trends that set “new rules” in healthcare: Blurred lines, which are the grey areas and adjacencies between technology, service, finance, and retail The middle of nowhere,
Closing the Digital Health Gap Between Consumers and Physicians
Consumers are more bullish demanding virtual and digital health tools from their physicians than doctors are in providing it, based on the research findings in What can health systems do to encourage physicians to embrace virtual care? from Deloitte. One-third of physicians have concerns about using virtual care services, such as medical errors that may result, access to technology, and data security. One in two U.S. consumers are now tracking health via digital tools, and one-half of these share the data generated by their apps. That sharing is limited by doctors’ ability to
In This Eroding Era of Trust, Consumers Look to Doctors Above Banks and Retailers for Trusted Sharing
In this moment post-Cambridge Analytica/Facebook, the launch of the GDPR, and the everyday-ness of data breaches, consumers most trust doctors for sharing personal information. I’ve mined, through my health economic lens, the U.S. data published in the insightful report, Data Privacy: What the Consumer Really Thinks, a global research study from Axciom and the Data & Marketing Association (recently acquired by the Association of National Advertisers) working with Foresight Factory. The report compares consumers’ personal views on privacy and trust in ten countries: Argentina, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, the UK, and the US. We learn that Americans
Value Comes to Healthcare: But Whose Value Is It?
The Search for Value is the prevailing journey to a Holy Grail in healthcare these days. On that, most stakeholders working on the ground, globally. can agree. But whose value is it, anyway? Three reports published in the past few weeks give us some useful perspective on that question, woven together in today’s Health Populi blog. Let’s start with the Philips Future Health Index, which assesses value to 16 national health systems through three lenses: access, satisfaction, and efficiency. The results are shown in the map. “Value-based healthcare is contextual, geared towards providing the right care in the right place, at
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
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
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
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
How to Make Healthcare More Intelligent and Trustworthy: Accenture’s Digital Health Tech Vision 2018
“Do no harm” has been the professional and ethical mantra of physicians since the Hippocratic Oath was first uttered by medical students. The origins of that three-word objective probably came out of Hippocrates’ Corpus, which included a few additional words: “to do good or to do no harm.” The proliferation and evolution of digital technologies in health care have the potential to do good or harm, depending on their application. Doing good and abstaining from doing harm can engender trust between patients, providers, and other stakeholders in health. Trust has become a key currency in provider/patient/supplier relationships: 94% of health executives
Health Care for a Typical Working Family of Four in America Will Cost $28,166 in 2018
What could $28,166 buy you in 2018? A new car? A year of your child’s college education? A plot of land for your retirement home? Or a year of healthcare for a family of four? Welcome to this year’s edition of the Milliman Medical Index (MMI), one of the most important forecasts of the year in the world of the Health Populi blog and THINK-Health universe. That’s because we’re in the business of thinking about the future of health and health care through the health economics lens; the MMI is a key component of our ongoing environmental analysis of the
Having Health Insurance Is a Social Determinant of Health: the implications of growing uninsured in the U.S.
The rolls of the uninsured are growing in America, the latest Gallup-Sharecare Poll indicates. The U.S. uninsurance rate rose to 12.2% by the fourth quarter of 2017, up 1.3 percentage points from the year before. 2017 reversed advancements in health insurance coverage increases since the advent of the Affordable Care Act, and for the first time since 2014 no states’ uninsured rates fell. The 17 states with declines in insurance rates were Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. Among these, the greatest