Communications As Trend Mgmt Tool for Pharmacy: Cliff Notes

Here are a few points from my recent webinar on this topic. If you are interested and a potential client, I would be happy to share the detailed content with you offline.
[Since all our competitors tried to sign up to listen in, I won't give away everything here.]

Talked about all the value sitting on [...]

Next Webinar - Retention

The webinar I did last month on using patient communications to drive pharmacy trend went very well. We are continuing our educational series. I also have the honor of giving the next one on a topic I have discussed here a little, but one which I feel very strongly about. Here it [...]

Compliance / Persistency / MPR

Non-compliance is a significant issue in healthcare.  You have the issue of whether people fill the prescriptions that their physician writes; whether they use them once they pick them up; and whether they continue to refill them and stay compliance over time.
You will hear several terms used:

Compliance is “the extent to which a patient acts [...]

Guest: On Price/Placebo Effect

Frederick Navarro is a research psychologist who, over the past 20 years, has focused his efforts on understanding people and the factors that shape their attention to health and care seeking. He has developed a unique model that approaches health care consumer behavior from a different angle than other models today. Over the past 10 [...]

Webinar: Prescription Trend Mgmt Through Communications

I must admit that one of my favorite things to do is give presentations. I used to do a lot of webinars at Express Scripts and have done a few others as a consultant. So, with that, I am really excited to schedule my first webinar as a Silverlink employee which I am [...]

ATDM: Automated Telephone Disease Management

No. It’s not my term or even a company term. I am not sure who came up with it, but it was actually used in a published study from 2001.

“Impact of Automated Calls With Nurse Follow-Up on Diabetes Treatment Outcomes in a Department of Veterans Affairs Health Care System.”
Diabetes Care 24:202-208
2001
John D. Piette, [...]

Medicare COB Conference

If you are a Medicare provider, you might be interested in a conference Silverlink is hosting on Coordination of Benefits (COB). It is open to potential clients only, but here is the general information. If you are a potential provider, here is the basic information about the event.
Medicare Compliance: Strategies & Tactics for [...]

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 [...]

Peeling The Healthcare Onion

I think an onion is the right analogy for healthcare for three reasons: (1) it can make you cry; (2) every time you pull off a layer you learn more; and (3) what you see from the outside is a lot different than what you see from the inside.

It can make you cry.

When you have [...]

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 [...]

Single Answer or Multiple Answers

I was having an interesting discussion yesterday about how to solve a problem.  The two opinions were whether there is a best answer or whether there are multiple best answers.  It’s a great question.
Let’s frame it this way.  Is there a message that is most likely to drive compliance for a group?  I gave them [...]

Diagnosis Code Plus Rx

In a WSJ Blog article about sound alike drugs, they have a potential solution about having the physician add information about why the drug is being used.  Obviously, the low hanging fruit here is to move to electronic prescribing where the clinical information (i.e., diagnosis code) is in the same file as the drug and [...]

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.  [...]

Where Are The Evidologists?

After one of their team posted a comment on my site, I went to Bazian’s website.  Very interesting.  They are a UK based company that focuses on providing evidence-based healthcare information to publishers, governments and insurers.  Sounds promising.  This is an important issue across the world as companies and practitioners look at how to embed [...]

Increasing GDR

I love reading healthcare articles which have acronyms that not everyone knows. (Maybe it was defined earlier, but I didn’t see it.)
Another nugget from the Caremark trend report is on programs and plan design components to drive generic dispensing rate (GDR) which is the number of prescriptions filled as generics divided by the total [...]

US News and World Report Health Links

If you haven’t been there, US News and World Report has a good site for healthcare rankings and other information. Here are a few of the things you will find there:

A link to Healthline where you can get help with Medicare Part D
A list of the top plans according to rankings by NCQA (National [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Patient (Customer) Value - Social Dimension?

I was reading an interesting entry on Forrester’s Marketing Blog about redefining the value of your customer away from ROI to something that reflects their social value.  The author defines social value as:
1) A customer’s knowledge and involvement - in short, his level of expertise and interest in the category and brand. 
2)  How he [...]

Myers Briggs for Healthcare (1 of X)

I have been a big fan of Myers Briggs for years.  Every since I took the test and realized that it described me to a tee.  I even took an elective in graduate school to drill down on the testing and look at ways to use it in team development and other activities.
The purpose of [...]

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 [...]

Picture is worth a thousand words (at least)

As a former architect, I am a big believer that pictures have significant value in the business world.  I have been asked dozens of times to take complex ideas and simplify them down to a single-frame image that people can post in their cube or use in a meeting.  These images can be powerful.
At Express [...]

BPM Lessons Learned

So…many of you thought I was going to offer some BPM lessons learned the other day.  Here they are:

If you jump right to technology, you will go backwards and have to do process mapping and/or reengineering.  Additionally, your project will take longer because you don’t understand your metrics and the business side.
BPM done right will [...]

BPR vs BPM: What’s Different?

I had the opportunity last week to debrief Michelle Cantara (VP at Gartner) about Talisen. We had met at the Gartner BPM conference, and she was intrigued by our offerings around BPM which include several fixed fee projects. In talking with her about BPM and sharing with her our methodology and typical sales [...]

The McKinsey Way

You can certainly never go wrong looking at McKinsey. Their consultants are usually very top notch and their process of thinking and root cause analysis is great. Although this post is more about how you analyze a problem (i.e., business process innovation), it also makes a point about how important process and methodology [...]

Lesson From The Apprentice

As one of my favorite shows, I was glad to see another good lesson in this week’s episode of The Apprentice with Donald Trump.  One of the three teams just completely bombed the assignment because they had no theme.
As you approach process work or BPM, it is critical to make sure you understand your current [...]

Power Facilitation

Back at E&Y, we had a process called the Accelerated Solution Environment (ASE).  For $250,000, we took clients through an amazing 2-3 day facilitated event that got months worth of work done with creative thinking and fostered huge buy-in across the groups.  Tons of clients did it, but it was expensive.
I lost touch with the [...]

Process Opportunity Prioritization

As you get your BPM project(s) to production, you will quickly see the tangible benefits and numerous opportunities will come to the surface.  How do you move to prioritize those?
There are several approaches including simple 2×2 quadrants that rank projects based on percent automation versus frequency of use.  Companies can also use the Kano Model [...]

Change Management

One of the areas of project implementation most overlooked across the board is organizational change management.  This “soft” area often scares people away, but anyone who has done a major implementation of a complex project will tell you the importance of this.  Every constituent has a WIIFM (What’s In It For Me) attitude, and they [...]