WALMART

One of the biggest impacts of technology among a potentially unexpected group of consumers is its ability to empower baby boomers to be independent for longer, according to Pfizer Consumer Healthcare senior director disruptive innovation wellness Rimma Fehling. Baby boomers are becoming the beneficiaries of extended independence as the result of technological advances that can cover physical distance with technological solutions.

Today’s health system is saddled with stark challenges, including runaway costs, exploding demand for services and huge gaps in the quality of care and in the sharing of patient records, treatment options, health risk factors and other data.

Christina Speck, senior director of consumer initiatives at Aetna

Successfully offering consumer-centric health care requires a multi-pronged approach that meets the needs of a wide variety of customer groups, Aetna senior director of consumer initiatives Christina Speck stressed at the recent Retail Health Summit.

“One-in-4 people over age 45 in the United States is chronically lonely.”

The use of homeopathic medicines as part of a self-care solution to treat such ailments as the common cold or back pain is becoming more and more commonplace through conventional channels. While a Harvard survey on the use of homeopathy published earlier this year in the American Journal of Public Health revealed that only 2.1% of U.S. adults have used homeopathy in the past 12 months, conventional outlets including Walmart, CVS Health and Rite Aid command 86.5% of the homeopathic dollar share, according to SPINSscan (powered by IRI).

Walmart’s Annie Walker

How can retailers and manufacturers work together to not only be partners in managing consumers’ disease states, but also to help educate a new generation about the importance of prevention? This was the driving question a panel of leading consumer health executives tackled in June, at a special one-day thought leadership conference in Bentonville, Ark., co-hosted by Drug Store News and Mack Elevation Forum.

One disconnect Bausch + Lomb’s John Ferris sees in the conversation about health care is the relative lack of attention paid to eye health — even though age-related macular degeneration affects two-and-a-half times more people than Alzheimer’s disease, and baby boomers are as concerned about vision loss as contracting heart disease and cancer.

In the retail and CPG industry, few terms get thrown around quite as much as “omnichannel.” But regardless of how it is defined, the in-store experience is still a major part of the customer engagement equation.