Remember the musings of 2019 industry analysts last December, pondering which digital technologies and biomedical and life science advances would make their mark in 2020? Despite all the right indicators and common sense — and even a global pandemic that no one could have predicted — too many of these cost-reducing and life-saving ideas fell victim to the unmovable health-system status quo. It was too comfortable just keeping the time-worn system in place.

In retrospect, on the eve of the new decade, we had the luxury of dipping our toes into the waters of digital and biomedical innovation and daydreaming…

Have you put on your “COVID 19?” If you’re among the many millions of people trapped at home who have put on weight during the pandemic, it’s understandable. But the humorous phrase — derived from the familiar “Freshman 15” of weight gain to which first-year college students are prone — is a serious matter. Whether we add 15, 19 or 25 pounds, adding notches to belts comes with a price tag. In many cases, business owners are picking up that tab.

As economists have been pointing out for decades, this nation spends way too much on healthcare; $3.7 trillion annually…

Happy anniversary! (Not!)

As we head into the COVID-19 lockdown anniversary — a non-celebration marking one year separated from family, friends, and workplace community — one thing is clear. A full year into a pandemic that’s killed more than 500,000 Americans and put a pause on the world economy, we are still struggling with shortages of accurate, high-quality, cost-effective screen options. Yet this is perhaps the single biggest key to recovery.

Most of the easy ways we do spot testing — temperature checks or symptom questionnaires — offer a 50/50 chance of identifying someone as COVID-19 positive. Those are terrible odds. And from…

Right now, state and federal governments are throwing everything at COVID-19 with an urgency so great that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued Emergency Use Authorizations (EUAs) that tear down long-standing obstacles to telehealth, digital health, diagnostics and innovative medications that may prove effective against the virus. Payers have been quick to follow, making these innovations — sometimes labeled “investigational” — available on their plans.

With the eyes of the world upon them, payers know that when beneficiaries’ health and corporate reputations are at risk, innovation is welcomed, and the “investigational” label is not a barrier to…

By the time the guns fell silent on the fields of Gettysburg on July 3, 1863, more than 40,000 soldiers — wearing grey and blue — lay dead, dying or wounded. Later that year, our nation’s 16th president, Abraham Lincoln, read words penciled on the way to the Gettysburg gravesites: the American government is “…of the people, by the people, for the people…”

Today, we imagine the graves of 400,000 Americans — identifying red and blue — who perished from COVID-19. Too many have died due to a nation divided, the absence of consistent state policies requiring mask use, or…

We have proven that we can invent COVID-19 vaccines at warp speed. It’s a scientific achievement realized by mobilizing bench chemists, researchers, modelers, clinical trial managers, and regulators. These high-tech workers slept, ate, and toiled around the clock, working collaboratively and leveraging information and technologies to create medical miracles, squeezing years of work into just a few months.

We’ve got vaccines. Getting vaccinated is another matter.

It is amazing how one aspect of our response to COVID-19 appears fueled by light-speed technology, while another seems to be powered by a spinning hamster wheel. …

I read their emails. See their faces. Hear the trepidation in their voices. They’re bewildered. Beaten down. Exhausted. The events of the last several years, culminating in the disasters of 2020, have truly tested Americans. We became a nation bullied.

And it isn’t over. The pandemic is at its worst right now, putting incredible stress on America’s public health infrastructure, schools and institutions, and the people and small businesses that are the nation’s backbone. …

Right now, giants in analytics are transforming our data into “what to buy next” ads. As their analytic tools troll silently in the background, assessing our virtual check-out preferences, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Tik Tok, Twitter, and a host of other mega-giant social communities prove, again and again, that data is the new currency for continued economic success. The approach rests on the certainty that the technology industry’s value and clout are rooted in its monetization of consumer data.

Deploying data now seems so obvious and simple as the economic pathway for accelerating decision-making and growth. But, less obviously, data…