The CQ: The Biggest Pain Points in Healthcare, According to Consumers
Plus the Forerunner Team's Top Read of the Week
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By Eurie Kim, Managing Partner
The US spends over 50% more on healthcare per capita than the next highest spending country. But these dollars are not working for US consumers: more than 70% of Americans say the US healthcare system is failing them. and despite have more resources than all developed countries, the US has the lowest life expectancy of its peer nations and higher rates of injury, illness, and dozens of different causes of death.
In Forerunner’s recent Consumer Trend Report, we looked at consumers’ biggest gripes with the healthcare system and found that affordability (60%), an over-emphasis on profits (40%), and access to insurance (30%) closely following by difficulty understanding insurance (28%) were the most significant factors.
Put another way, the US healthcare has very low NPS.
This all has consumers keen to take their health back into their own hands and out of the maze of a system that feels encumbered by bureaucracy and driven by profits over quality care. This appetite has fueled a new class of digital health companies that enable consumers to have more agency by circumventing the traditional access points, be that telehealth (Him&Hers, Curology, Amplify MD), devices and wearables for personal health insights (OURA), at-home tests (Tally Health), and more.
But too much independence and agency with our health can ultimately breed stress and confusion — there’s a profound mental overhead associated with piecing together issues, data, and solutions for care.
A new class of companies is emerging centered around interdependence, marked by an effort to make historical systems work better for consumers vs. implying they should be circumvented. Think: care navigation ($4B industry, 8% CAGR), concierge medicine ($7B industry, 10% CAGR), and price transparency ($80B impact). Some examples: Alma, Fay, Certainly Health, and Sika Health.
While the majority of digital health companies innovated around the edges of the healthcare system (out-of-network or do not accept insurance, for example), in this next chapter of progress, we are keen to see health companies turning inward to alleviate systematic healthcare challenges head-on. How much better could the healthcare system be if consumers had a proper tools and support to navigate it?
For more, check out our full Consumer Trend Report.
What We’re Talking About on Slack:
Gen Z is becoming the Toolbelt Generation, according to WSJ. As more young people are turning away from college, enrollment in vocational-focused community colleges has increased 16% last year since 2018, students studying construction trades rose 23%, and those in programs for HVAC and vehicle maintenance and repair increased 7%. A surplus of jobs and rising pay for skilled trades is a big selling point. While new hires in professional services earned $39,520 annually last year, the median pay for new construction hires rose to $48,089. Scoring a trade apprenticeship is in high demand, with 75% of high school and college-age people saying they’d be interested in vocational schools offering paid, on-the-job training and that blue-collar jobs seem to have greater job security in light of AI.
The True Cost of Churchgoing Going Bust. From The Atlantic: “More than one-quarter of Americans now identify as atheists, agnostics, or religiously ‘unaffiliated,’ according to a new survey of 5,600 U.S. adults by the Public Religion Research Institute. This is the highest level of non-religiosity in the poll’s history. But maybe religion, for all of its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence.”
Here’s why AI search engines *supposedly* can’t kill Google. The Verge put several new AI tools to the test to see how well they performed the most-Googled queries in comparison to Google search. Notably, Google won out in speed, navigation queries (for instance, typing “Amazon” to navigate to the website), real-time queries (like sports scores), and anything related to location. Where AI tools shined: pulling out buried information (i.e. delivering a direct answer to “how to screenshot on a Mac), whereas Google would provide a list of links that the user would need to read through to get an answer. Same for exploration queries — AI tools conveniently synthesized suggestions, while Google just supplied links. “Can Google reinvent its results pages, its business model, and the way it presents and summarizes and surfaces information, faster than the AI companies can turn their chatbots into more complex, multifaceted tools? Ten blue links isn’t the answer for search, but neither is an all-purpose text box. Search is everything, and everything is search. It’s going to take a lot more than a chatbot to kill Google.”
Axios explains why the U.S. could be on the cusp of a productivity boom. Productivity growth has been weak in the U.S. since the 2008 financial crisis due to a decline in capital investment. According to a new McKinsey Global Institute report, there’s reason to believe the coming years will improve. “The rise in global interest rates and inflation are evidence of stronger global demand. Many countries are experiencing labor shortages that may incentivize more productivity-enhancing investment. And artificial intelligence and related technologies create big opportunities.”
A new study of unicorn founders finds most are ‘underdogs,’ and female founders are rising. Of 2,018 unicorn founders from the U.S. and U.K., research shows that in 2023, 70% are immigrants, women, or people of color. Unicorn founders used to just be males, but in 2023, 17% were female. Furthermore 38% of unicorns had at least one founder who was not white, and 62% had first- or second-generation immigrant founders. What’s also interesting: researchers discovered the common traits unicorn founders shared including having no “plan B,” having “a chip on their shoulder,” and unlimited self-belief.
The ‘always on, always in’ era is over. Bloomberg illustrates how the pandemic inspired more American workers to pursue work-life balance and how that is having a big impact beyond the office. For one, more people are moving away from cities and that’s “reshaping the country’s economic geography.” For instance, there’s the $16.5 billion of outflow of adjusted gross income from Manhattan to other places in the U.S., notably Florida. Since office occupancy is around 50% of pre-pandemic levels, there’s also a trend in transforming offices into mixed-use spaces. “Developers like us have shifted in response to the work-to-live mindset among employees by creating properties...with a live-work-play balance and experiential amenities under one roof. The key to future-proof properties is to meet what are now ever-changing wants and needs of workers and residents. That’s done by keeping open and flexible floor plans and having indoor and outdoor spaces where people can gather.”
Vox explores how AI could explode the economy—and how it could fizzle. There are some AI researchers who believe that AI will lead to supercharged economic growth rates as high as 20% to 30% a year, likely before 2100. A growth of 30% would mean the economy would double in size about every 2.5 years, meanwhile current growth levels indicate that the U.S. economy won’t double for 35 years. “As long as there are other jobs (chefs, child care providers, construction workers) where AI isn’t driving large increases in productivity, the result of this process will not be explosive growth. The result will be employment and prices in automated sectors collapse, those sectors become less important as a share of the overall economy, and economic growth as a whole is still bottlenecked by sectors where productivity growth is hard to achieve.”
Is ‘doomslang’ making us all numb? Esquire examines how “End Times vernacular”—e.g. “dumpster fire,” “hellscape,” “doomscroll,” even the “This is Fine” dog—have casually infiltrated our language. Experts say people are turning towards gallows humor as a coping mechanism and a way to acknowledge the despair they’re feeling from the pandemic, the growing threat of climate change, and the current economic and political strife (not to mention, social media algorithms churning out constant streams of the most extreme news). But according to one social scientist, this will only lead to disaster fatigue and then complacency: “After apocalypse rhetoric inevitably comes trivialization. Our systems are not built to take a constant onslaught of bad news, especially if it has the potential to affect us or our loved ones directly.”
It’s a ‘nepo’ housing market: 38% of home buyers under the age of 30 expect their parents to help with a down payment, says a new survey. In 2019, only 18% of millennials got help from family to fund a down payment. Housing costs have increased so much that even those earning a solid income are seeking help from parents. In lieu of cash, some young people plan to take money from their inheritance or are living with family to save money. “The bigger problem is that young Americans who don’t have family money are often shut out of homeownership. Many of them earn a perfectly good income, too, but they aren’t able to afford a home because they’re at a generational disadvantage; they don’t have a pot of family money to dip into.”
Adventure travel is increasingly not just for the young, say adventure outfitter companies who report that the average age of their customers is older since the pandemic. Additional comforts, like lodges with good food and guides to haul gear, make these types of “roughing it” trips more appealing to older travelers. Plus, older people typically have the time and money needed to go on treks in Patagonia, mountain biking tours in Ecuador, or climbing in the Alaskan backcountry. One adventure travel company says that the number of their customers who are over 65 has jumped from 23.5% in 2019 to 35% in 2023.
Portfolio Highlights:
Tally Health CEO Melanie Goldey speaks about what she does to lower her biological age in a video for Fortune.
Sunday founder and CEO Coulter Lewis visited the Modern Retail podcast.
Essence profiles comedian Wayne Brady who discusses his partnership with Chime and his past financial hardships.
The Verge, TechCrunch, CNET and others cover the launch of Oura Labs, which invites users to test out new features.
Great write-up on where healthcare innovation needs to go! I completely agree that more companies need to be integrating with historical systems to make healthcare work better for consumers and be more value-based than profit-driven.