Future of Marketing and Advertising

Here is an interesting presentation on a view of marketing from outside healthcare.  I think it is a healthy way of thinking of the challenge.

Great Book - Microtrends

At PBMI, one of the best speakers was Kinney Zalesne who with Mark Penn wrote the book Microtrends. I just finished reading the book - all 370+ pages. I found it to be one of the most engaging non-fiction books I have read in a long time…which says a lot. I have [...]

Don’t You Know Me

A Harris Interactive poll published in AdAge a few weeks ago, talked about the value people put on companies knowing who they are. We have all had that experience where you put in your phone into the IVR then get asked to verify it when the person picks up the phone and asked again [...]

Health 2.0: My Notes

I am just flying back from the Health 2.0 conference out in San Diego. I feel like there is a ton of information that I want to share so kudos to Matthew and Indu for the great job. (And, if you make it to the end of this post, you must really like [...]

Data Power

Communications and data provide us with a valuable tool.  How to leverage facts and put them forward in a way that drives a response.  For some that is getting people to buy a magazine (e.g., 82% of Americans do X…read the article on pg X to learn more).  For others, it is to drive them [...]

Total Value; Total Return

I came across a new website today for the Center for Value Based Health Management.  Their definition of Value-Based Health Management is below.
“The planning, design, implementation, administration, and evaluation of health management practices that are grounded in evidence-based guidelines across the healthcare continuum.”
It is a great concept.  The question always is how to do this [...]

Myers-Briggs in Healthcare: Part 2 of X

I was looking for a book the other day to read on some of my flights and came across Health Care Communication Using Personality Type by Judy Allen and Susan A. Brock. I have just started reading it, but I related very well to their key assumptions:

People prefer to communicate in different ways.
Most people [...]

Information Latency: Why Don’t We Change?

I have had this note to self for a while so I am finally going to put a quick entry out here on the topic.
The issue is data latency or more appropriately information latency.  The data often exists right away, but the challenge is how to you get the data into a usable form, with [...]

Making Good Decisions

This is a classic article that I have reused several times.  The article “Great Escapes” by Michael Useem and Jerry Useem appeared in Fortune (6/27/05) on pg. 97.  It is about thing to use to avoid typical decision making problems.
These are all relevant for anyone in business or healthcare, but with the massive amount of [...]

Communications

I can never stress the value of communication skills to anyone I met regardless of the path they want to go down in life.  I have had the luxury from an early age of public speaking beginning with something called Model United Nations (MUN) where you represent a country in mock-simulations of the UN process.  [...]

Working With Clients: Some General Thoughts

One of the best discussions I have heard for account management was by Andrew Sobel. I was digging through some files today and came across some of my notes. I thought I would share a few of my takeaways which I think are good general advice.

It is essentially to be trusted.The four attributes [...]

Types of Business Blogs

I was looking at something that someone sent me from Paul Gillin’s Social Media Report about different types of blogs. I found it pretty interesting especially some of the examples.
First, he talks about company blogs including the CEO blog and the group blog. They definitely can be interesting, but it really is a question [...]

A Few Other Facts From CSC’s Survey

While I was flipping through CSC’s 2004 Customer Intelligence Diagnostic Survey, I found a few other interesting facts:

Only 20.7% of the 58 Fortune 1000 companies have a 360 degree view of the customer (i.e., consolidated data across the enterprise)
Only 41% of them had used external data to augment their internal customer data
Only 10% of the [...]

Sticky Messaging

We used to talk a lot about stickiness of websites and eyeballs back in the late 1990s. The word still has some attraction and is a key point in the recent McKinsey interview with Chip Heath. Chip is a professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business.
“The key to effective [...]

Applying Technology Trends to Healthcare

McKinsey recently put out their 8 technology trends article (access available with free registration). I thought I would translate those to the topic of healthcare communications. Hopefully, we don’t have to be hit by a bolt of lightning to change, but we realize and can document the ROI of acting now and improving [...]

Prioritization Framework

I was cleaning out some files over the weekend and came across an old prioritization matrix that we used at Ernst & Young when I was a consultant there. I found it to be relatively easy to use and understand so I thought I would share it. Ever person I know always struggles [...]

Staying Current - Blog Options

Obviously none of us have time to stay current with everything. Remembering all the blogs you like, visiting them regularly, and reading all the e-mails, mail, and publications can be overwhelming. I can’t simplify it all, but I thought I would suggest two ways of staying informed if you find this or other [...]

HBR Health Consumer Segmentation

Harvard Business Review has an article “What Health Consumers Want” by Caroline Calkins and John Sviokla (both from Diamond Consultants) in the December 2007 issue.  I think they sum up one of the problems that I talk about with a couple of quick comments in the beginning:
“Yet the idea that companies might profit by segmenting [...]

Do We Know What We Want?

In the November 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review, there is an article called Mapping Your Competitive Position by Richard A. D’Aveni.  From a general business perspective, it’s a good article which presents an interesting case about how you could have predicted that Apple would have dropped the price on the iPhone.  (Hint: Look at [...]

WSJ on Texting in Healthcare

Obviously my entries about texting in healthcare are timely. Today’s WSJ includes an article (pg D1) by Rachel Zimmerman called “don’t 4get ur pills: Text messaging for Health”.
She points out several compliance type programs where this is being used (outside the US)…birth control pills (England), AIDS (Australia), psychological support for bulimics (Germany), and smoking [...]

Reverse Auction for MDs / Hospitals

In healthcare, you sometimes hear people talk about waiting (at the pharmacy, for an appointment) while other people seem to get right in.  A lot of this has to do with geography (remember ‘healthcare is local’ but it also has to do with cycles.  For example, Mondays are always busier after the weekends.  [I have [...]

Mashing Two of My Posts

I was thinking about Google’s SMS service earlier today (see post on this).  Separately, I was thinking about my post on remembering health information (e.g., drugs, strength, previous lab values).
So I went to one of the Google Health Blogs to suggest the idea.  Unfortunately, the e-mail they list bounces back and you can’t leave comments…strange.  [...]

Emotional Intelligence (EQ)

I will admit that I have a lot to learn around EQ which is firmly grounded in neuroscience, but I wonder why I don’t hear a lot about this from a communication perspective. Obviously, our reaction to information varies based on where we are emotionally. At the simplest level, I think EQ is [...]

P4P - Pharmacists vs. MDs

I only heard a piece of the presentation yesterday at AHIP (America’s Health Insurance Plans), but I was a little surprised. They were talking about the topic of P4P (pay for performance). The survey population clearly supported P4P for MDs with the primary objective being preventative care and compliance. This focus did surprise me since [...]

Analyzing Your Writing

Lois Kelly has an interesting post on her blog about the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count program. You run text through the program and it categorizes the writing style. She compares 3 CEO bloggers. I grabbed text from my site and ran it through.
If I understand the results below correctly, it says I am fairly [...]

Text Google for the 411

Google seems to be everywhere. It is probably the one site that I have to teach my kids to know to get anywhere. Perhaps they need a “Google Kids” which offers games, safe content, etc.
Anyways, this is more of a tip than anything about healthcare, but I was fascinated to find out about [...]

Geekipedia

Sure…a little off topic, but understanding technology is one of the critical components (in my humble opinion) to driving innovation and change in healthcare. Healthcare is not an early adopter of solutions. There is too much fear about change (and litigation).
So, when Wired but out this magazine supplement called Geekipedia, I knew it [...]

Understanding Healthcare (Wurman)

Richard Saul Wurman has been publishing for years and done many interesting things.  I just stumbled upon his Understanding Healthcare site today.  It is worth a visit.  You could get lost in it, but it has lots of great examples about how to frame healthcare issues visually.  I took a few screenshots below to get [...]

Silverlink - My New Employer

After trying a few entrepreneurial things, I am excited to have accepted a job working with a consulting client of mine - Silverlink Communications. [I am also a former client of theirs from my time at Express Scripts.] The role is a good mix of entreprenerial and stability since they are a high [...]

Information Therapy Blog

I was looking at the Healthwise website and The Center for Information Therapy and came across a blog by the team there with some good discussion topics. It is definitely worth your read. Here were a few things that caught my eye:

Can we more effectively engage consumers in better managing their own health [...]