Dear clients and friends: Given your interest in health and medicine, we would like to share with you our collection of the most interesting perspectives on our industry's trends and developments. We are happy to share them with you — and hope you share your thoughts with us.

1. Paging Dr. Orwell

The American Medical Association has published “Advancing Health Equity,” a guide designed to help healthcare professionals avoid harmful and oppressive language in clinical and medical discussions. Not everyone is impressed:

“Instead of trying to depoliticize medicine, the AMA has doubled down and is going full woke. The publication is so over the top I thought at first it was satire,” Alex Tabarrok, an economist at George Mason University.

“The new guide is likelier to hinder equity than to advance it. The most vulnerable Americans suffer disproportionately insofar as the medical system adopts language to advance an ideology rather than to communicate clearly.” Conor Friedersdorf,The Atlantic

“Paging Dr. Orwell,” Matt Bai, Washington Post

2. “Patients Are Consumers”

“Patients are consumers all the time,” argues John Glaser, executive in residence at Harvard Medical School and former CEO of Siemens Health Services. Writing in HBR, Glaser posits that this view doesn’t commodify but empower:

Health care providers have traditionally been concerned with patients but not with consumers. Many providers abhorred the word “consumer” or “customer,” feeling that the term cheapened their skills and importance. The result has been an emphasis in medical care on the quality of the technical aspects of care (diagnosis and treatment) and an almost denigration of the consumer aspects of health and health care (convenience, low cost, and friendly)…Health systems are only belatedly recognizing the need to provide great medical care and a terrific consumer experience — that performing poorly in one role will impact performance in the other. The medical care may be world class, but if the experience is dreadful, the patient may seek care elsewhere or inform friends and family that they should avoid a condescending physician.

3. How to Prevent Patients from Becoming Consumers

Deloitte picks an easy target – the US’s bloated healthcare spending on sickness not wellness – but makes a hard case for why things will change:

Historically, the US health care system has been geared toward treatment. For every US$100 spent on health care, about US$80 currently is spent on the diagnosis and treatment of patients after they become sick. By 2040, we expect spending on well-being to account for two-thirds of total health expenditures.

While Deloitte’s projection runs counter to historic trends, we believe the US health care system’s transformation is already underway. We expect investments to increase in data and algorithms that help generate health and well-being insights, including devices and apps that nudge behavior promoting well-being—and also in initiatives that address the drivers of health and help address disparities in health outcomes, such as housing, transport, and diet.

4. Read More Here

FiveThirtyEight has launched a new site “to track the data on COVID so you don’t have to.” It sets out to answer the complex questions facing us all. One example:

What do we know about the rate of long COVID?

What you can assume: Long COVID is real, and it is possible for anyone to get it. That includes kids and vaccinated people — although both are probably less likely to end up with long COVID than unvaccinated adults. But we don’t really know the rates, largely because there still isn’t any universal definition of what does and doesn’t count as long COVID. Be cautious with assuming anything too precise from very imprecise research.

Why we make this assumption:

- Researchers say most studies of long COVID are still frustratingly vague, flawed and hard to compare with one another.

- Long COVID is real.

- Preliminary research suggests long COVID is less likely to occur in patients who were previously vaccinated and in patients under age 10.

5. Risky Business

When AI meets psychiatry, apps abound. In 2020, there was a 2,483% increase in internet searches for mindfulness apps, leading a bull market for “emotion AI.” Brookings takes a skeptical look at the industry that uses “facial expressions, speech, gait, heartbeats, and even eye blinks”:

The Good: Emotion AI attempts to solve the affordability and availability crisis of mental-health care. First-time downloads of the top 10 mental wellness apps in the United States reached 4 million in April 2020, a 29% increase since January.

The Bad: One study revealed that only 2.08% of psychosocial and wellness mobile apps are backed by published, peer-reviewed evidence of efficacy. [One] study on self-guided mobile apps for depression found that 74% of registered participants ceased using the apps.

The Ugly: Emotion AI cannot capture the diversity of human emotional experience and is often embedded with the programmer’s own cultural bias.