Today, I am speaking with marketing leaders who are members of CHPA, the Consumer Healthcare Products Association on this very topic. This is CHPA’s 2019 Marketing Conference being held at the lovely historic Hotel du Pont in Wilmington, DE.

The gist of my remarks will be to focus on the evolving retail health ecosystem, with my HealthConsuming lens on health/care, everywhere.

And timing is everything, because today is International Self-Care Day to promote peoples’ health engagement.

The plotline begins with a tale of two companies — CVS/health and Best Buy — discussing these two organizations’ approach to acquiring companies to expand beyond their core businesses: that is, pharmacy and drug distribution, and consumer electronics at retail.

In each case, the companies are integrating in new ways, vertically and horizontally, to serve new markets. CVS/health is waiting imminently to hear the outcome of DC-District Judge Leon’s opinion about the company’s competitive positioning with its acquisition of Aetna, the insurance company. In the meantime, CVS is expanding the HealthHub concept to drive care beyond the behind-the-counter pharmacist, and last week announced its market entry into home-based dialysis.

For Best Buy, buying Great Call last year and Critical Signal Technologies last month, expanding means providing services for older people aging at-home, with potential collaborations with Medicare Advantage plans. THINK: Geek Squad meets health/care and IoT for home health.

These are but two examples of retail disruption in health/care, without mentioning Amazon yet — which I will do in my live talk. Beyond Amazon, I’ll discuss Apple and Cigna and Google and Walgreens and Microsoft and UnitedHealthcare, among other tech and retail players re-shaping the retail health sandbox for self-care in which I’ve been working for the past few years.

Ultimately, it’s not just retail products and services that are the end-game here, though these in themselves can drive revenue. There are data generated in each organization with consumers and patients and caregivers, and there’s value that can be created from that data.

But as I discussed in yesterday’s post on the financial, clinical and ethical dimensions of patient data, companies must earned and sustained peoples’ trust to engage them in their health care. Being a good data steward is a key competence for organizations who want to participate in the growing health/care data ecosystem.