Market Research
Doctors Don’t Want Patients to Access EHR Info
04/03/2013
Most U.S. Doctors Believe Patients Should Update Electronic Health Record, but Not Have Full Access to It, According to Accenture Eight-Country Survey
March 4, 2013 – A new Accenture survey shows that most U.S. doctors surveyed (82%) want patients to actively participate in their own healthcare by updating their electronic health records. However, only a third of physicians (31%) believe a patient should have full access to his or her own record, 65% believe patients should have limited access and 4 percent say they should have no access (See Figure 1). These findings were consistent among 3,700 doctors surveyed by Accenture in eight countries: Australia, Canada, England, France, Germany, Singapore, Spain and the United States.
Patients Access to Records
While nearly half of U.S. doctors (47%) surveyed believe patients should not be able to update their lab test results, the vast majority believe patients should be able to update some or all of the standard information in their health records, including demographics (95%), family medical history (88%), medications (87%) and allergies (85%). And, the majority of doctors (81%) believe patients should even be able to add such clinical updates to their records as new symptoms or self-measured metrics, including blood pressure and glucose levels. Read the rest of this entry »
Not Enough Doctors for Baby Boomers
02/13/2013
With over 10,000 baby boomers turning 65 every day, there may not be enough doctors to care for them as they age. As Seth Doane reports in this CBS News report, over the next ten years there may be 40,000 fewer doctors than needed. Will technology take up the slack? It may have to, and that’s one reason I started Modern Health Talk – to discuss those technologies.
The two-minute video is filled with lots of new statistics that I added to
our growing list about the Healthcare Problem & Opportunity.
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Americans are sicker and die younger (with VIDEO)
02/05/2013
Being American Is Bad for Your Health
By Marty Kaplan, Director, Norman Lear Center and Professor at the USC Annenberg School
“Americans are sicker and die younger
than people in other wealthy nations.”
That stark sentence appears in the January 2013 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, and it comes from the authors of a landmark report – “Shorter Lives, Poorer Health” — on differences among high-income countries. (Editor: This WHO Interactive Chart compares mortality rates from different causes.)
You probably already know that America spends more on health care than any other country. That was one of the few facts to survive the political food fight pretending to be a serious national debate about the Affordable Care Act.
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Unpaid Caregiving in America
01/22/2013
According to AARP, 43.5 million Americans are caregivers, and although they do it out of love and obligation, caring for a loved one takes a personal and financial toll.
The economic impact is surprisingly high. It was over $480B/year in 2009, a figure that includes lost worker productivity, reduced earning capacity & retirement income, and increases in their own physical & emotional health and related costs. That’s about 3.2% of the U.S. GDP ($14.1 trillion in 2009). It’s more than the $361B in Medicaid spending. And it’s nearly as much as the $509B in 2009 Medicare spending. It’s also more than half of what we spend on defense. The burden is even worse for long-distance caregivers.
The infographic below details caregiving in the U.S. Read the rest of this entry »
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Big Data and the Future of Healthcare
01/16/2013
Accessible introduction transcript…
- Every day technology makes new things possible, and some predict that it’s just a matter of time until technology completely revolutionizes healthcare.
- Some believe that medical diagnosis, general patient care, and medical practices are more expensive and inferior than they need to be.
- The problem with health care is that it’s often the practice of medicine, rather than the science of medicine, as most medical decisions are simply based on tradition, a doctor’s limited medical knowledge, and the patient’s known symptoms and medical history.
- The result? Three doctors could diagnose a problem three different ways. This can be a serious issue.
- Over 40,000 patients die in the ICU in the U.S. each year due to misdiagnosis.
- The solution? Big Data. Some believe medicine can become more of a science, rather than practice, by relying on technology.
INFOGRAPHIC follows… Read the rest of this entry »
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Working Poor Families Struggle to Pay Bills
01/16/2013
There’s a Direct relationship between poverty, obesity, and the cost of health care.
Here’s some statistics, mostly from the 2010 census:
- 15.1% of Americans (46.2 million) live in poverty, including 22% of our children. 20% live in extreme poverty.
- 3.2 million Americans were kept out of poverty by unemployment insurance.
- 20.3 million were kept out of poverty by social security.
- The poverty threshold for a family of four is $22,113; the 2010 avg. income of the bottom 90% was $26.364.
- $6,298 — decline in median working-age household income from 2000 to 2010.
- 49.1 million — number of people under 65 without any health insurance.
- 13.6 million — decline in people under 65 with employer-sponsored health insurance from 2000-2010.
- Public health officials can accurately predict obesity and longevity rates by zip codes. One inner city example had an average lifespan of just 64 years while it was 90 years in a wealthier neighborhood just 8 miles away. (HBO’s documentary, The Weight of the Nation)
- Disadvantaged communities are at higher risk for many preventable health conditions, including obesity, diabetes, heart disease, asthma, HIV/AIDS, viral hepatitis B and C, and infant mortality, largely due to the lack of health care, nutritious food at affordable prices, and sidewalks and parks to encourage exercise.
- Pressures from Job, Money, Divorce and Violence cause a vicious cycle of Stress = Obesity = Stress.
Tech innovation and automation also plays a role, increasing productivity and profits for some, but eliminating jobs faster than creating new ones. Dr. Oz apparently agrees, as shown in this article, which also features a CBS report on the jobs impact of robotics and a collection of slides that I recently presented to a local jobs group.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/15/us-working-poor_n_2476463.html
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CES 2013, GPS for the Soul and Digital Health Revolution
01/14/2013
I attended CES in person this year instead of monitoring the show from the comfort of my home office and writing my traditional report, CES in Pajamas. On the first day I attended “The Digital Health Revolution: Body, Mind and Soul,” a panel discussion hosted by Arianna Huffington and am thrilled that Huffington Post is so prominently promoting conversation and innovation supporting better health & wellness. Its GPS for the Soul smartphone app, for example, complements lifestyle articles around the theme “Less Stress, More Living.” Here’s an article that Arianna published on the first day.
CES 2013, GPS for the Soul and the Digital Health Revolution
By Arianna Huffington, 1/07/2013
Greetings from Las Vegas, where I’ve landed in the midst of a perfect storm. I’m not talking about the weather — it’s a crisp, beautiful day here. No, I’m talking about one of those moments in which several trends converge to create something larger, a moment we will look back on as the time everything changed. Read the rest of this entry »
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Bringing Dead Back to Life & Envisioning a Healthy Future
01/01/2013
The beginning (or end) of a year is a good time to remember & reflect on the past while pondering & planning the future. So today’s post comes from Huffington Post, with ties into other articles about Personal Memoirs & Memories, Perpetual Websites & Memorials, the upcoming Consumer Electronics Show, and Future Forecasts. It’s about the well-known futurist and inventor, Ray Kurzweil.
- Recalling & Recording Your Life’s Story,
- The Legacy of a Digital Generation,
- Friends from Beyond and Your Digital Will,
- CES in PJs – 2011,
- CES 2012… in Pajamas,
- A Consumer Electronics Christmas 2012,
- Getting Ready for CES 2013,
- Future Forecasts, and
- Market Research Resources & Articles.
Adding Kurzweil to the executive staff at Google may help the company stay vibrant and even increase its impact on information technology. Google also invested in Kurzweil’s Singularity University, which strives to understand and facilitate the development of exponentially-advancing technologies and apply, focus and guide these tools to address humanity’s grand challenges. He envisions using a search engine to access a database of your thoughts, stored in the Cloud, in a way that mirrors your values and personality.
Ray Kurzweil, Google’s Director Of Engineering, Wants To Bring The Dead Back To Life
Inventor Ray Kurzweil hopes to develop ways for humans to live forever, and while he’s at it, bring back his dead father (at least virtually). Behind him is the support of a tech giant. This month, Kurzweil, a futurist, stepped into the role of Director of Engineering at Google, focusing on machine learning and language processing.
Health & Medicine Outlook 2013
12/28/2012
“Human actions could become more accurately predictable, thanks to neuroscience. Nano-sized robots will deliver cancer-fighting drugs directly to their targets. And though many recently lost jobs may never come back, people will find plenty to do (and get paid for) in the future,” according to forecasts you’ll find in this roundup of the most thought-provoking possibilities and ideas published in The Futurist magazine over the past year.
I’ve extracted the following Health & Medicine forecasts from the World Future Society’s special report, Outlook 2013. It’s a promotional piece to attract new members who then get a subscription to The Futurist.
- Better health, but fewer doctors.
A projected shortage of more than 90,000 doctors by 2020 will drive technological innovations such as low-cost, point-of-care diagnostics—i.e., Lab-on-a-Chip technologies. A cell-phone-sized device could analyze your blood or sputum while you talk to a health provider from the comfort of your home. —Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler, “The Abundance Builders,” July-Aug 2012,p. 17
Read the rest of this entry »
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Texas Rankings Disappoint
12/23/2012
 Click on the image to view: “Texas on the Brink,” a 2001 report from the Texas Legislative Study Group that includes many more rankings and supporting statistics. Not much has changed. |
Texas near the Top:
Blessed with an abundance of land, rivers, oil and other natural resources, Texas pioneers built a great state, and even today, it seems that everything is bigger in Texas. I’ve lived in this “Great State of Texas” for most of my live, moving here from Arlington, VA in 1976, and I now live in the state capitol of Austin. So I call myself a Texan, but in many ways I’m not proud of my state. Here’s why. We relish in being #1 in many things, but not these:
- Texas is #1 in the percent of population uninsured
(as if that would be something to brag about). - We have the largest number of uninsured children (#1).
- We have the most toxic chemicals released into water (#1).
- We generate the most hazardous waste (#1).
- We have the most carbon dioxide emissions (#1).
- We also have the most executions (#1).
- We have the second highest birth rate
and are 4th in the number of kids living in poverty. - We have the second highest percent of population under 18.
- We’re #2 in percent of population with food insecurity.
- We’re #4 in percent of population living below poverty.
