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 ..read more

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 thi ..read more

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 Cent ..read more

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 ..read more

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 emerg ..read more

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 patient, family, and caregiver concerns Insufficient g ..read more

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 ..read more

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 agend ..read more

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 tha ..read more

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 top of this list Right Here, Right Now.     ..read more