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Nov 04 2010

The Story on Healthcare IT: Creating Connections

By healthcare industry, technology

The highest and best use of IT in healthcare is to create strong, healthy connections between doctors and their patients. One of the most critical pieces of that is giving patients access – both to their health data, and to their healthcare providers – along with permission to engage. I wear two hats in the healthcare space: patient activist/advocate, and healthcare communications/media consultant. My healthcare-focused company WellCentrix is building a reputation for understanding both the business (doctors & other providers) and the customer (that would be the patients, not the insurers) side of healthcare. I attended the Virginia chapter of the Health Information & Management Systems Society’s annual conference last week, and posted a wrap-up report of what I heard there over two days of sessions. If you’re a patient – and we’re all patients, even doctors are patients – you might want to get some intel on what healthcare IT leaders are doing, thinking, and planning. Click HERE to find out!

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Sep 21 2010

HACKED: The Douche Is Out There

By Uncategorized

This site – the main presence on the web for my business – was hacked by a group of losers who fly under the banner h4ck-y0u. They replaced my deathless prose (well, some of it is, at least IMO) with a handprint graphic and the theme from the X Files. Jeez, kids, bored much? I have to give both myself and GoDaddy some props – me for figuring out the MySQL fix via the WP Codex (speaking of hackers…); GoDaddy for actually providing real tech support, and it only took two calls to reach a dude named Brian who, to my utter surprise, really did help. Brian: new BFF. Srsly. Bottom line? I’m working hard over the next couple of days to further harden my WP security. Be warned: the douche is out there…

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Sep 03 2010

When Jet Blue’s Ship Came In, They Were At the Airport

By PR

Well, of course they were at the airport. They’re an airline. My point is that by not responding quickly to the Steven Slater Beer-Slide incident, they’ve really missed the boat on kicking off a great conversation about and among an entire industry and its customers. The conversation is kicked off, and JetBlue is a major part of the story, but they screwed up a huge opportunity to manage a crisis well. It took them TWO DAYS to formulate a response on their blog. In hiding behind the “we don’t comment on individuals” curtain, they missed a chance to become the Great & Powerful Oz of the air travel industry, at least in the customer-cabin-crew-connection-and-convo category. What would I recommend to a company who finds themselves in the position that Jet Blue was in on Monday? Offer a comment along the lines of “today’s events are offering us an opportunity to start a conversation across our industry about customer service and workplace conditions. If you’d like to share your views with us, [blog/email/Facebook/Twitter] – we welcome the chance to explore how we can improve our relationships with our customers AND our employees.” That doesn’t assess or assume blame, but it says you’re paying attention. Monitor traffic, engage in conversations with heart but not an excess of passion (IOW, don’t pull a Slater). Monitor commentary about your brand, and the individual who set off the situation. Respond only to direct queries by pointing them at your crisis-comms traffic cops mentioned in Bullet 1. Jet Blue wasn’t completely silent. Unfortunately, the cries and whispers of the guy who manages their corporate comms Twitter feed got into a Twit-fight with Andy Borowitz (@BorowitzReport). In a battle of wits with a comedian, Jet Blue’s guy is an unarmed combatant. And he forgot the 1st rule…

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Aug 05 2010

Dear Google: It Ain’t a Free Trial If You Charge Me

By media commentary

I have been a Google brand advocate for over a decade. Fell on their search engine like a starving dog when it launched in beta in ’98 (even then, they really were better than everybody else), and have enthusiastically jumped in on all their web-based tools as they’ve rolled out. Since I switched to an Android-powered phone recently, and am trying to find the right tools to sync my Outlook contacts (almost 2K) with both my Droid and Google Contacts – backups to the backups, always available – I decided to investigate Google Apps. Their Premier (paid) Edition looked like it was worth a try. And they offer a 30-day free trial. Or at least they say they do. I signed up for the free trial. They asked for my credit card number, and I gave it – I’ve taken advantage of many free trial offers the same way. I use it, if I like it, I stay and pay. If I don’t like it, I cancel during the trial period. Has always been easy…until Google Apps. I was concerned when I saw a charge appear on my credit card account online almost instantaneously after I signed up for the “free” trial. How is it free if you’re charging me for it? I followed the “Support” thread in an attempt to find why they’d charged me. This is all I got: In case you can’t make out the text at the bottom, it says that even though it looks like I was charged, I wasn’t. I beg to differ. $50 that has been taken out of my account is $50 I don’t have access to – which sounds like “charging” to me. I canceled the trial immediately. The charge IS STILL ON MY ACCOUNT ALMOST 36 HOURS LATER. Trying to…

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Aug 03 2010

The (Real) Story on “Mad Men”

By Uncategorized

First, let me make this clear: I’m a big fan of the Emmy-winning AMC series Mad Men. That said, I go through a veritable buffet of reactions during each episode – fear, loathing, fear AND loathing, and occasionally PTSD. The PTSD and the fear/loathing are inextricably intertwined,  due to the fact that I started my sojourn in the workforce in the mid-70s, when the captains of industry exemplified by Sterling, Cooper, Draper, and the rest of the boyz were running the show. On Madison Ave., Main St., and everywhere else. Being an XX in an XY world – the ’70s – meant dealing with behavior exactly like what was on display in last Sunday’s episode of Mad Men. All my bosses back in the day presumed that I was in the workforce to land a husband. And they assumed that my presence in their world meant that I was a perfect candidate for Bedroom Romper Room as pre-marital training. I was still in college, working a part-time job, when a boss cornered me in the supply shelves and told me to put out, or get fired. Had he been less Aldo Ray and more Henry Fonda, I might have gone for it. He wasn’t. I was fired, and overjoyed about it. The early days of the sexual revolution essentially amounted to guys assuming they had a right to hear “yes”, but grrlz had no right to say “no”. Starting in the late ’60s, and going up to – and through – the Age of AIDS, it was a never ending grope-fest. Seriously. I was working in an ad sales division of a major broadcasting network by the late ’70s, serving a sentence as a secretary in exchange for NYU Film School tuition. (A rockingly fair deal.) The sentence-serving piece came…

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Jul 28 2010

Are Afghan Papers the 21st Century’s Pentagon Papers?

By media commentary, PR

Daily Beast’s lead story today reveals that the Justice Dept. and the Pentagon have expanded their investigation of Bradley Manning, the US Army analyst who handed over what I’m calling the Afghan Papers to Wikileaks. As someone who is, um, experienced enough to remember the Pentagon Papers dust-up in 1967 when the war in Vietnam was ramping up, and the DoD and White House were – to call a spade a spade – flat-out lying to the American people about the US military expansion and operations in southeast Asia, I feel compelled to make this observation: Democracy requires truth. Truth is the enemy of politics. Those forces will be forever set in opposition, which means that, from time to time, the blood – or freedom – of patriots must be sacrificed on the altar of that truth. Nothing I have read about Manning gives me the impression that he was looking for any kind of recognition or compensation from leaking the Afghan Papers. According to his friends, this kid – and he is a kid, under 25 years old (Ellsberg was 35 when he leaked the Pentagon Papers) – was hugely conflicted about what he observed on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, and what he saw reported further up the chain. As our adventure in the sand continues in Afghanistan and Iraq, in aid of a purpose that I don’t think anyone has a clear grip on, I find myself thinking that Bradley Manning has more cojones – and courage – than anyone in the Pentagon. One of his fellow soldiers, posting anonymously on Daily Beast, tellingly says that the Afghan campaign is called The Ocho (inspired by one of my favorite movies, Dodge Ball) by troops on the ground, and is thought to be an exercise in futility…

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Jul 23 2010

NOTHING ABOUT ME WITHOUT ME

By e-patients, healthcare industry, healthcare price transparency

The last few weeks have been a cluster-dance of activity in the e-patient community. Actually, pretty much any week is a fast dance in the participatory medicine world, given the drive toward healthcare reform in the US. The loudest dance orchestra has tuned up around the controversy created when the American Hospital Association (AHA) posted its comments on the Phase 2 Meaningful Use (MU2) rules, which are part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), a/k/a healthcare reform or Obamacare, depending on what your preferred nomenclature is. The bottom line: even though the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has made re-admissions to the hospital within 30 days after discharge a giant “we won’t pay you for that” red flag, the AHA stood up on its hind legs and said, regarding MU2, that they did not want to make records available to patients for 30 days post-discharge. Which seems to mean that the AHA is either totally OK with not getting paid for a re-admission within those 30 days, or they’re trying to use a giant hammer to kill the adoption of electronic medical records technology. A third explanation – and one that I think is actually what’s happening here – is that the last couple of years of massive IT deployment in healthcare has been really hard. And the policy wonks who wrote the comment for the AHA have little or no dealings with actual patients. Because anyone with a brain who works in healthcare knows that not empowering patients to manage their care is the best path to both bad outcomes and bankruptcy. If you’d like to read all about the issue, you should start with David Harlow’s Healthblawg e-Patient Dave Healthcare activist artist Regina Holliday (the Rosa Parks of patients’ rights)

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Apr 08 2010

The Sad Story About Joint Replacement (in the US, at least)

By healthcare industry, healthcare price transparency

A hip or knee replacement can offer people with chronic joint pain the chance to return to an active life. The potential promise of being pain-free, in some cases after decades of restricted movement, is a powerful incentive to arthritis sufferers around the world. I know from direct observation that not all joint replacements result in the patient returning to the dance floor, or the jogging track, or even the walking path. My dad had a hip replacement in 1996 that inserted the wrong appliance, leading to 18 dislocations in the ensuing three years. The issue was finally resolved with yet another surgery, paid for by Medicare and my father’s supplemental insurance. This was a doctor error, not an appliance failure. Imagine my surprise this past Saturday (April 3, 2010) at this piece in the New York Times, revealing that almost all manufacturers of artificial joints offer no warranty whatsoever to US consumers who wind up with defective products surgically strapped on to their skeletal structure. The dodge is facilitated by the way device manufacturers sell the implants: to the hospital, not to the patient. The skids on that dodge are further greased by the consulting fees paid to many surgeons by implant makers, giving those surgeons little impetus to bite the hand that feeds them. Here’s a chart for the visual learners: US device manufacturers who sell artificial joints overseas offer warranties in the countries outside the US where their implants are used. Why not here? One reason could be our tort-crazy system. Got a consumer complaint? Don’t try to work it out directly – hire a lawyer and sue the bastards. That does not, however, excuse the failure of medical device makers to offer any kind of warranty on their products. And it’s not excuse for their expectation…

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Mar 15 2010

The Powerful + Multifaceted Story That Is Temple Grandin

By media commentary

Temple Grandin is a cross-species hero. Her appearance at TED makes me wonder: what took them so long to invite her? Her work with animals, particularly in the design of slaughterhouses, revolutionized the cattle industry. As an autistic, she is the living representation of what’s possible with what she calls “unique minds” – her passion is in direct opposition to the standardization that has strangled education in the US for decades. The current economic landscape is driving school systems toward more standardization as budgets get slashed, particularly for the subjects that engage outlier minds: shop, art, music. Einstein was likely an autistic-spectrum mind – probably Asperger Syndrome – so what does it mean for innovative thinking in our society that we’re taking non-standardized minds and forcing them down paths that will cut them off from their ability to think in new ways? Sounds like the essence of cruelty. In fact, it’s intellectual slaughter. We’re forcing kids down chutes, prodding them toward the end of the track – in this case, a high school diploma, not a killing bolt to the forehead, but how many minds are killed by the proc What can we do? Fight to keep visual and verbal arts in the curriculum for public schools, for one. Another would be to consider a 2nd or retirement career in the classroom, particularly if you’re a scientist or artist. Be an innovative thinker yourself. That’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it…

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