The always-anticipated Edelman trust barometer for Health was released last week and it is eye-opening. The 65-page report is, of course, thorough but it really shows how populations are retracting trust across many institutions.

When asked about people as sources of health information, the family doctor is still monarch of the hill. Numbers are down across the board, and in amounts that aren't inside error, but the doctor and other medical experts are out in front for trust.

This report measures the division in populations across six health myths (based on current scientific consensus). A full 25% of the global population believes vaccines are used for population control. In a strange way that's true, in that they are used to keep people alive so that could be argued to be a type of population control. However, the question would almost certainly be interpreted as population reduction (not a helpful aside -Ed.).

Even among people who believe 3+ of the above statements, doctors are still the number one source of health advice.

Edelman also asked which sources of health information had influenced their personal health decisions and the numbers came back somewhat differently. Now, doctors are competing with other sources such as creators and AI for some topics. They remain the leaders in diagnoses.

Apologies for the eye-chart but we charted the numbers with a heat map and highlighted the top source(s) in each category. For serious health issues doctors come out ahead except for "critical treatment" where perhaps patients don't feel like they have a lot of discretion. 

Creators come out ahead on four of the categories highlighting the impact they are having worldwide.

AI has become an important health tool in just three short years. 35% of the global population say they use AI to actively manage their health, and that number varies wildly.

For these patients, AI runs across many use cases, with treatment suggestions number three at 78%.

When asked about what Edelman classifies as "sub-sectors" respondents had a relatively favorable view of pharma companies. Hospitals and pharmacies were top of the list, of course.

The US trails the rest of the world in trust and unfortunately this is particularly pronounced for pharma companies.

This overlong Wire story highlights how much interesting data is in this report. For this reason it gets the industry's most self-effacing award (that's false humility if I've ever seen it -Ed.).

McKinsey has a new report on AI adoption in healthcare. It is based on the McKinsey US Gen AI Healthcare Survey and included 50 payers, 50 clinical-care organizations, and 50 healthcare technology vendor firms. It was conducted in October so the data is over six months old at this point. 

88% of healthcare providers either have GenAI tools in place or are conducting proof of concept. This is similar to payers and HST firms but the latter has the most implemented projects.

The up-and-coming technology of course is agentic systems. Here we see comparable numbers when combining the top two slots, but with a focus on proof of concept rather than implementation for this new technology.

This chart has a footnote on each item and they can be found on Page 4 of the report. The researchers ensured that only relevant organizations answered each use case. For example, "Clinical productivity" is only for "Acute and ambulatory provider operations, clinical workforce."

This isn't news, but AI implementations are generally financially positive. Here, we see that 82% of respondents expect positive or higher ROI from their projects.

This report isn't exhaustive but it's a good touch base on AI projects in health and points to continued adoption.

DigiPharma and FreshPaint have a report out on pharma marketers' views on privacy and compliance. The report is based on two surveys of 100 marketing leaders and 100 privacy leaders from pharma and biotech.

Here we have combined two charts from the report to show the data subset of the impacts. Most marketers are impacted and when asked to choose one answer said launch and targeting as largest issues.

When it comes to patient data, the regulations themselves are the top concerns for pharma privacy and compliance leaders. However, the FTC enforcement actions are also on their minds. 

The data flows that worry compliance leaders center on patient services but website data collection and audience targeting also show on the list.

Marketers were asked to select the top three stages of DTC that are hardest to measure. The chasm between brand action and Rx fill is top, of course, but even website visits were on the list.

Now seems like a good time to mention that Klick has the industry's largest integrated medical team, nicknamed the Mediverse (promotional, nice touch -Ed.).

A paywalled study from researchers at CUNY provides more evidence that AI is being adopted for health. First, the standard "doctors come first" chart for trust in health information:

Alongside this trust is 58% of people saying they trust AI for health information.

The Commonwealth Fund has a new report out about health disparities by State across the US. There are many charts showing the variation, which can be large in some jurisdictions, and this one stands out. This is the percentage of each group who have avoided healthcare because of costs in the past 12 months.

See the full report for many more data points if you need insight into disparities by state. 

An article published last week features an AI decision support tool called PETRUSHKA. We only have access to the summary results but they are positive.

The chart below shows the percentage of patients that discontinued treatment at 8 weeks.

Symptoms of depression and anxiety are rated on questionnaires of nine and seven questions, respectively. The PETRUSHKA group scored lower at 24 weeks than the control.

For creators, the comment section is where they want to engage with their audiences. Especially on YouTube this is an important tactic as it improves the video's placement in the algorithm. 

Sensor Tower has put out a report, with the help of Emarketer, on ChatGPT's ad performance. No methodology is given so we assume it's the firm's first-party panel plus estimates.

Wire readers are likely tired of us pointing this out, but the 50x number is against a number that started only seven days after the first ad was delivered. Still, it's interesting to watch as OpenAI ramps up its ads service, which now includes a self-serve ads manager.

AI is great, but search is not dead. When asked where they start their shopping experience AI users said Search. And with Google AI Overviews... they might get the best of both worlds.

Google's Q1 financial report highlighted that its search revenue was up 19% to $60.4 billion. 

That image shows the cash inflows and outflows of the company and is a great way to visualize the entire system. At the top-right readers will see a net profit from "other" which is "paper gains" from its private equity investments.

The whole image is an eye-chart though so here is just the revenues for easier reading.

Mattel ran a shoppable CTV ad for Fisher Price baby toys and found some remarkable results.

Viewers were obviously ok with interacting on the TV, at least initially. You can see the ad at the vendor site, Vudoo.

IQVIA has a teaser for it's paid report "U.S. Medicine Use Trends 2026." In the teaser information was a breakdown of the top-line increases in cost.

There is a generous number of charts in the preview data so it's worth a look if you want US market stats.

Common Thread conducted a study of 299 brands with $231M total channel spend in Q1 2026. At least for ecommerce they found a very strong bias toward Meta, especially for "acquisition" which we interpret as performance. For all channels they got:

The story has a lot more content, such as ROI estimates, but the above was the most interesting for pharma marketers.