Archive for August, 2008
Comments
Communicating With Michelle Obama
Comments off
First, congratulations to Barack Obama on getting the nomination. He is a great orator and regardless of who I vote for I think he will be an exciting candidate.
From a healthcare communications perspective, I found an NBC Today Show interview with Michelle Obama very interesting yesterday. She talked about three things that seem to be […]
Comments
Smoking Among Healthcare Workers
Comments off
I was driving past a hospital this morning and saw several workers outside smoking. They both looked like physicians, but I could be wrong. Given all we know about smoking, I wondered if the prevalence of smoking is higher or lower within employees of the healthcare industry. From a quick Google search, it didn’t reveal […]
Comments
Hospital Death Rates
Comments off
USA Today now has an interactive chart to show you the hospital death rates for several diseases (heart attack, heart failure, and pneumonia). It’s worth checking out.
When you run a scenario, here is an example of what you see:
Comments
Selling Hope
Comments off
I will admit that I have been a closet democrat for years although that may finally be changing. I have watched about 15 minutes of the Democratic National Convention (DNC) this year and can’t seem to get motivated. I get so turned off by selling “hope”. Are you kidding?
Working in the communication field, I find […]
Comments
Healthcare Reform Won’t Be That Easy Mr. Obama
Comments off
Election campaigns typically feature pontificating politicians flashing silver bullets to painlessly slay the nation’s problems.
Just move some money from here to there, cut some government waste no one apparently ever noticed, and then fund an unattainable promise with an outlandish price tag.
Barack Obama’s healthcare reforms fit this model nicely. He bundles three evergreen feel-good concepts […]
Comments
Less Sketchy: More Scary
Comments off
When you think about identity theft you think of your credit card information being compromised and someone ringing up $1,000s of dollars worth of charges that ruin your credit history. If I say medical identity theft, you probably think about your information being stolen and used to ring up fraudulent bills by crooked providers.
But, in […]
Comments
No Pharmacy Coverage - I Doubt It
Comments off
In the AIS e-mail on Friday, it had the following quote:
“If the economy remains weak over the long term, we could certainly see employers and government agencies looking to investigate cutbacks on the type of pharmacy benefit they are offering, or eliminate pharmacy as a benefit altogether [in commercial plans]….The problem with [this] is that […]
Comments
E-Prescribing…Here to Stay?
Comments off
About a month ago, an analyst was asking me about the e-prescribing legislation and trends and how that would impact the financials of the PBMs. I told her that I remained a little bit of a skeptic for several reasons:
[Basically e-prescribing is the use of a handheld device or personal computer to automate the […]
Comments
Practice Makes Better
Comments off
I am playing in a golf tournament this weekend and was talking with a couple of golf pros about handicaps and rules. They were talking about people “sandbagging” their handicaps which to me implies directly trying to influence their handicaps by not recording good scores or intentionally scoring poorly. (Your handicap is basically […]
Comments
8 in 8: Michael Phelps Wins The Gold
Comments off
What great motivation for a generation of people. First, you have Dara Torres winning 3 silver medals at the young age of 41. She shows us all how you can be a semi-normal person with a family and still compete at this level. (I say semi-normal since I don’t know if she […]
