Still Life in Need: Art, Food Justice, and Health
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
Health Care Nation – How to Inspire a Rosa Parks Moment for Healthcare in America?
Tom Lawry may be best-known as a leading voice on AI in health care; after all, he’s written two very well-selling books on the topic, speaks all over the world on the subject, and in his most recent company-based gig helped lead Microsoft’s efforts in AI in health care and life sciences. When his publisher asked him to write a third book on AI in health care – still a hot topic in publishing – Tom said he’d rather turn to a subject long on his mind: the state of health care in America and how to change the conversation
From Bowling Alone to Eating Alone – What the Shift to Take-Out Food Means for Our Social Well-Being and Mental Health
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
One Way to Improve U.S. Healthcare, Lower Costs and Drive Outcomes? “Unvendor,” Asserts Dr. Harm Scherpbier in His New Book
Health information technology professionals charged with selecting, implementing, updating, and paying for health IT in hospital and care delivery settings are essentially the first-line “consumers” of health IT – specifically, electronic health records. But these health IT leaders feel far from empowered and choiceful as consumers in todays EHR vendor “monoculture,” Harm Scherpbier, MD, explains in his book, Unvendor. I spent time with Harm to discuss the book, its backstory, and what he hopes to accomplish by raising the issue of single-vendor health IT and how clinicians, health IT staff, and
Art Collides with Health Policy: When “When Calls the Heart” Met MAHA This Week
Art reflects life — or in this case, bumps into life and health care — once again when the pop culture facet of my own media consumption converges with a news announcement where the timing of these events is just too uncanny. It never occurred to me I’d ever write about the Hallmark Channel in the Health Populi blog. But reading the news that President Trump’s administration plans to cut funding for the ongoing 30-year study into diabetes and pre-diabetes — the landmark National Diabetes Prevention Program (NDPP) — dovetailed (or perhaps more honestly stated, collided) with the plotline of
The New “Paging Dr. Google?” DTC-AI for Health Care
While most people in the U.S. who have used large language models (like ChatGPT) for informal learning, entertainment, and getting information about products and services, 39% of U.S. adults have also tapped into LLMs to source information about physical or mental health. This insight is brought to us in the brilliantly titled report, Close encounters of the AI kind, from the Imagining the Digital Future Center at Elon University. The principle author of the survey report is the Center’s Director, Lee Rainie, whose name many of you will know from his two+ decade career at the Pew Research Center (and
The Growth of DIY Digital Health – What’s Behind the Zeitgeist of Self-Reliance?
Most people in the U.S. use at least one medical device at home — likely a blood pressure monitor. used by nearly one-half of people based on a survey of 2,000 consumers conducted for Propel Software. The Propel study’s insights build on what we know is a growing ethos among health consumers seeking to take more control over their health care and the rising costs of medical bills and out-of-pocket expenses. That includes oral health and dental bills: 2 in 5 U.S. consumers use electric toothbrushes (a growing smart-device category at the
A Mis-Trust Hangover for Health Care 5 Years After COVID Began – an Edelman Trust Barometer Update
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
The Top Patient Safety Risks in 2025 Are Mostly About the “Human OS” – Reading ECRI’s Annual Report
Each year, ECRI (the ECRI Institute) publishes an annual report on the Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns for the year. The 2025 list was published today. My read of it is that most of these risks have to do with what I’ve been referring to as the Human OS, the Human Operating System, in my talks and teachings. In this post, I’ll focus on 2 of the 10 most top-of-mind in my current workflow with clients and speaking: #1 and #3. Here’s the list of 10, calling out: Risks of dismissing
Consumers Are Financially Stressed – What This Means for Health/Care in 2025
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
Think Quintuple Aim This Week at #HIMSS25
As HIMSS 2025, the largest annual conference on health information and innovation meets up in Las Vegas this week, we can peek into what’s on the organization’s CEO’s mind leading up to the meeting in this conversation between Hal Wolf, CEO of HIMSS, and Gil Bashe, Managing Director of FINN Partners. If you are unfamiliar with HIMSS, Hal explains in the discussion that HIMSS’s four focuses are digital health transformation, the deployment and utilization of AI as a tool, cybersecurity to protect peoples’ personal information and its use, and, workforce development. I have my own research agenda(s) underneath these themes
Improve Sleep, Improve the World and Health: ResMed’s Look at Global Sleep Trends
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
Telehealth, Right Here, Right Now: Calling on Congress to Vote for America’s Health and Well-being
In the U.S., there are some issues that still unite most Americans in 2025. We can agree that, • The cost of eggs is too high • AI can be both exciting and promising at the same time as concerning • It sucks to have your personal data cyberattacked and breached, and, • Having access to telehealth is important. While I would be really sad to give up my omelets, I’m sticking a mindful toe into AI for some simple workflows, and I’m still dealing with the aftermath of the Change Healthcare data breach, it’s the looming telehealth deadline that’s
GLP-1s at the Pharmacy – A Lens on Consumer-Driven Retail Health (with Hims & Hers stock price update)
The nature of retail pharmacy is changing, with both threats and opportunities re-shaping the business itself, and the pharmacy’s role in the larger health/care ecosystem. To keep sharp on the topics, I attended Rx Market Insights: Performance Trends and Outlook for 2025, a data-rich session presented on February 18 by IQVIA and sponsored by Ascend Laboratories. The webinar was hosted by DSN (Drug Store News), appropriately so because the action-packed hour went into detail providing the current state of prescription drugs and the pharmacy in America. Doug Long, IQVIA’s VP of Industry Relations, and Scott Biggs, the company’s Director of Supplier
COVID-19 Further Splits American Society as Trust Continues to Erode – a 5-Year Perspective from Pew
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
Physicians’ Confidence In and Use of AI is Rising, AMA Finds – Coupling Demand With Many Enabling Factors
Doctors’ use of and demand for augmented intelligence in medical practice is on the rise — with many factors that could bolster or risk adoption on the journey toward AI in the doctor’s office, based on the latest survey from the American Medical Association (AMA) published this week. The AMA polled U.S. physicians in November 2024 to gauge their views on augmented intelligence (AI) addressing doctors’ use of AI, perceived opportunities and risks, and enabling factors for adoption. This study updates AMA’s survey conducted in 2023 and found significantly growing confidence and utilization
Health/Care at Super Bowl LIX, GLP-1s, Kaiser and Tufts on Food-As-Medicine, and the RFK, Jr. Factor: A Health Consumer Check-In
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
Health Consumer Check-In: From Digital Detox to Analog Wellness, Social Re-Wilding, and a Return to the Bookstore
As humans have undergone personal digital transformations, living omni-channel and appreciating the conveniences that being switched-on can bring, there’s a growing demand for “analog wellness.” That’s one of ten trends covered in the Global Wellness Institute’s (GWI) report on 2025 Wellness Trends, and one I want to dig into early this year as consumers are facing growing challenges to our privacy, social bullying, and workforce stressors compelling many employees to spend too many hours in digital isolation and loneliness. To paint the larger landscape of and drivers underpinning analog wellness, I will weave several important reports and studies together, all
Measuring Progress for Life Sciences: Trust, Patient Access, and Prevention at a Fork in the Road of Public Health
How will we know if the life sciences sector is advancing in 2025? This is the question asked at the start of the report, a Research Brief: 2025 Indicators of Progress for the Life Sciences Sector, from the IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science (IQVIA). To answer that question, IQVIA identified ten indicators for this 2025 profile on the life sciences sector. I selected four key data points for this discussion which provide particularly informative insights for my advisory work right now at the intersection of health, people/consumers, and technology: Trust for/with/in life science
Some Bipartisan Concurrence on Health Care Issues in the U.S. – But Trust in Health Care Isn’t Bipartisan – KFF’s January 2025 Polls
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
Thank you, Jared Johnson, for including me on the list of the "Top Voices of Consumer-Centered Healthcare." Your curated community includes some of my closest colleagues and friends in the field to whom I also turn for that health consumer-focused lens. The patient - consumer, caregiver, health citizen - is the primary noun in health/care and self-care is primary care. My thanks for this call-out, JJ!
I am so grateful to Tom Lawry for asking me to pen the foreword for his book, Health Care Nation, which will be published in late March 2025. Tom, known for his pioneering leadership in AI, has rediscovered his voice for health policy -- and health citizenship. He is asking Big Questions and asking us to do the same -- and act on those insights for our own health, the health of people we love, and the health of our fellow health citizens. The uplifting subtitle: "The future is calling and it's better than you think." Onward!
Thanks to Feedspot for naming this blog, Health Populi, as a top 100 best healthcare technology blogs and websites in 2025. It's gratifying to be in such great company with KevinMD, The Health Care Blog, the Journal of AHIMA and other online resources that inform my health-tech views.