SelfCare is health/care, particularly as patients, everyday people, take on greater responsibility for clinical decisions and paying for medical services.

We’re convening today through Sunday in Indianapolis with GMDC, the Global Market Development Center and Retail Tomorrow to brainstorm the current and future prospects for SelfCare, health and wellness in the hands, hearts, and homes of consumers.

To bolster the message and engage with industry stakeholders, GMDC collaborated with the Hamacher Resource Group to develop a SelfCare Roadmap, an interactive tool that provides insights into twelve conditions where consumers typically looking to DIY their health using over-the-counter medicines, supplies and products, food, services, and information. The conditions include allergies, anxiety, arthritis, asthma, diabetes, digestive health, oral care, post-op care, skin care, sleep disorders, upper respiratory, and wound care.

As you look at this “Wheel of SelfCare,” you see there are data gathered for each condition with stats on prevalence, insights into conditions, retail info on “basket size” of spending for products and the categories within those baskets, and geographic differences across patients living in different parts of the U.S.

GMDC organized data from many sources including Acosta, Nielsen, and many partners on the supply side who shared statistics and research to populate the tool.

The Summit has four learning tracks including:

  • The SelfCare Consumer & the Retail SelfCare Roadmap
  • The Rise of the Healthcare Consumer sponsored by Health:Further
  • Retail Tomorrow: Delivering on SelfCare; and,
  • The Role of Natural and CBD, which is so fast-growing the topic has its own agenda line.

My talk on “The New Health/Care: Patient-Led, Retail Enabled,” is scheduled on the Selfcare Consumer & Retail SelfCare Roadmap track today (Friday 4 October 2019 at 315 pm.

I’ll talk about the drivers re-shaping patients into health care consumers and payors of medical care, motivating people toward greater health and wellness engagement accessed outside of “Pill Hill,” hospitals and doctors’ office.

This is the retail health opportunity, which can be bridged by the legacy healthcare system if hospitals and clinicians choose to collaborate with pharmacies, grocers, retailers, tech developers, social care agencies, faith-based communities, and other touchpoints where people live, work, play, pray, learn, and shop. This ecosystem concept encompasses healthcare services as well as linking people to resources and channels to bolster the social determinants of health.

Health Populi’s Hot Points:  The “Retail Health is Health/Care, Everywhere” graphic comes out of my book, HealthConsuming, from the chapter on “The New Retail Health.”

SelfCare is part of a larger phenomenon of people actively engaging in health with trusted touchpoints where they find value and where their own values are represented. As I write in the end of HealthConsuming, our homes are increasingly our personal health hubs, where we co-create health with our loved ones, our communities, and if we can build trusted and resilient clinical bridges, with healthcare providers and suppliers. Note that in addition to the usual retail health players you might expect at a meeting like this, I’ll be meeting up with folks from UnitedHealthcare, here to talk about member engagement and health ownership. That’s the central premise of health citizenship I describe as America’s Holy Grail for health in the last chapter of the book, so I’m very keen to discuss this with UHG and other health ecosystem stakeholders attending the SelfCare Summit.

For more on the GMDC SelfCare Roadmap, check out this video…