Upcoming Webinars

If you missed it last week, I am giving a repeat performance of my webinar on retention.  I am going to talk about driving customer satisfaction and building loyalty to improve retention which is and should be a hot topic for everyone in healthcare. (Sign up here for the 23rd at 1:00 EDT)
Additionally, my peers [...]

Convergence: MiCoach

As a runner, I found this interesting new product c/o The Hospital Impact blog.  The video is pretty engaging on the MiCoach.  It blends a GPS technology with an MP3 player with a personal coach with a phone and links it to a website for tracking.  If I wasn’t a runner, I would have some [...]

Is Prior Auth Purely For Sentinel Effect?

In talking with a few PBMs, it is clear that they approve 90%+ of all prior authorization (PA) requests that come in. With that, I instinctively think of two questions:

Why do it at all?

If you’re going to do it, why have humans involved?

I haven’t seen the data on prior authorizations and how many people [...]

$200K Word Change

I was talking with a friend last week who has spent all his time at small, nimble companies. He was amazed at the challenge of getting something prioritized and completed in a big IT shop where process can often kill flexibility. There are lots of reasons for this – doing all the small [...]

MOM = MCM + PM + CEM + DAM

I read an article this morning by Chris Graham on Multichannel Marketing which I thought was a great framework for several marketing related items I have been thinking about.  He talks about the following:

Marketing Operations Management (MOM)
Multichannel Marketing (MCM)
Permission Marketing (PM)
Customer Experience Management (CEM) and
Digital Asset Management (DAM)

If you don’t know what all these mean, it doesn’t surprise [...]

Medical Devices and the 10 Faces of Innovation

Today, I unsuccessfully searched for a smart consumer device that would link process and medical monitoring.  I am sure it is out there, but I couldn’t find it.  The opportunities are numerous.
Imagine having a device that monitored your blood sugar levels and sent off messages based on your current levels.  The messages could be to [...]

Is Marketing a Process?

Is marketing a process or really a bunch of sub-processes that are part of other end-to-end processes?  I was looking at how to automate the different marketing functions (new product development, product management, pricing, research, marketing communications, and voice of the customer) and realized that most of these are simply part of a bigger process.
The [...]

BPI Example

I often get asked the question of what I mean by BPI or Business Process Innovation.  I often talk about how process can create a competitive differentiator for companies.  There is technical innovation, product innovation, cultural innovation, etc.
Here is a quick example.  I am a die-hard Quicken user.  Every time I get gas, I print [...]

Asking a 90-year Old to Use E-mail

You can use business rules in many ways.  I think one of the most important areas is in customer segmentation.  There is initial segmentation around which customers to target with which offering (e.g., cross-selling, multi-variate analysis).  There is secondary segmentation around which message will compel them to act on an offering (e.g., campaign management).  Additionally, [...]

Marketing Process

Interestingly, yesterday, I heard from five different companies about using BPM for marketing. So, I have spent the day (and will continue to spend time) flushing out the marketing processes and the value proposition associated with improving marketing processes and managing them using BPM.
For example:
* Reducing the cycle time of product development
* Easing version control [...]

Healthcare Appeal Process

Healthcare is such an easy target for BPM opportunities.  I am living one right now.
In December, we had to refill a prescription for my son.  It happened to be 2 days before Christmas.  Since I had switched insurance carriers, Aetna now required a PA (Prior Authorization) for the drug (although my son had been on [...]

eRx with BPM?

From a pharmacy perspective in healthcare, one of the more elusive solutions has been e-prescribing (or eRx).  There are numerous companies (e.g., Allscripts, Prematics, Purkinje, RxNT, Zixcorp, iScribe) that have solutions and many more that have died over the years.  When I was at Express Scripts, we funded RxHub which was an industry solution by [...]

Pricing Lifecyle

A key part of the 4Ps of marketing (price, promotion, product, and place) is pricing.  One of the complications with pricing is its lifecycle.  The biggest example that we all see around pricing is with airlines.  You can pay all kinds of different prices based on supply and demand, time or day that you buy [...]

BPM for Marketing

I have just recently talked with a few clients about using BPM technology in the marketing area.  As one put it, this is the one of the last bastions where companies look at process.
That being said, there are lots of opportunities for process management within marketing:

Most marketing groups are involved with new product development.  One [...]

The E-mail Process

I usually think about applying BPM to paper intensive processes.  I think I need to expand that focus to include e-mail centric processes.  Not that it wasn’t inclusive before, but talking about it in those terms seems to bring out new opportunities.
Just in the past two days, I have met with a Fortune 100 and [...]

Creating the automated coach

A typical struggle that a large company has is how to deal with mid-market companies or average customers.  Typically national clients or repeat customers get great attention, but it is hard to give this same customized attention to an average customer even if they might be your next big customer.
This challenge is exasperated by the [...]

CVS / Pharmacare / MinuteClinic

What a perfect opportunity.  CVS (retail pharmacy chain) owns Pharmacare (pharmacy benefit management company) and owns MinuteClinic (onsite medical clinics).  Right now, if you went to a clinic or physician or hospital, you have created one customer record.  At your retail pharmacy, you have another customer record.  The PBM that processes your pharmacy claims has [...]

Patient as Process Instance

Anyone who has ever been sick knows that our healthcare process is inefficient.  There is lots of paper.  There are numerous handoffs.  Things get dropped.  Patients spend lots of time resolving things that should be automated.  Well, I am not going to give you the answer since there are millions out there trying with limited [...]

Outbound IVR Process

Here is another example from a previous life.  As part of my direct marketing program, we used to use automated outbound calls from a company called Silverlink.  They do a great job with the calls and providing management tools to monitor the calls.  But, a BPM solution could have helped us to automate the process [...]

Letter Approval Process

In a previous job, I managed a direct mail program where we mailed several million pieces per year.  It was a complex process which included getting client sign offs, interrogation of data against a customer segmentation model, managing several hundred letter variations, and coordination with a inbound call center for responses.  Although we had a [...]