Skip to main content

Free Speech For Me But Not For Thee

(Thanks to Nat Hentoff for the title, by the way.)

Blogger and BIDMC CEO Paul Levy spent a few moments this morning here on Health Care Strategist, leaving a comment taking me to task for accepting advertising from the SEIU. If you've read Paul's blog, Running A Hospital, you know there's a long-running, very public disagreement between BIDMC and the SEIU over a number of issues.

The ad in question is one of Google AdSense's context-sensitive ads, appearing when you click on one of several posts specifically mentioning BIDMC. To my knowledge, it's never shown up on the main page - at least I've never noticed it before.

The SEIU is obviously running a keyword-driven, anti-BIDMC web campaign. Purchasing BIDMC-related keywords is their right and, from their perspective, a smart, easy, low-cost thing to do. Were I Paul, I'd get my web team to do the same thing, only more so - more ads, bigger ads, better ads, more keywords, better response tracking, more presence, more impressions, more RFM.

It's an equal-opportunity web, Paul. Fight fire with, well, fire of your own. And I'll cut you a great deal to advertise here.

BTW, keep up the great work on the layoff thing.


Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
Of course they have a right to advertise. That wasn't the point, and you are wrong to suggest that I would want to interfere with their right to do so.

The question was about you, not them. I was wondering why you would want such negative and misleading stuff on your blog, which tends to be much more respectful and factual. I guess you think it doesn't reflect on your content.
March 25, 2009 at 10:53 PM
Steve Davis said…
Paul,

I don't want their ads here.

I merely signed up for Google's AdSense program, not for the SEIU's ad campaign. I'd never noticed their ads until you pointed them out, at which point I blocked from appearing here any more.

MY POINT was simply that there's lotsa ways for you to compete with their message.

Thanks for your comment about my content generally!

SDavis
March 25, 2009 at 11:10 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Michael Porter On Health Care Reform

Michael Porter, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, proposes "A Strategy For Health Care Reform - Toward A Value-Based System." His proposals are fundamental, lucid and right-on, meaning they're sure to be opposed by some parties to the debate, the so-called "Yes, but..." crowd. Most important, in my opinion, is this: "... electronic medical records will enable value improvement, but only if they support integrated care and outcome measurement. Simply automating current delivery practices will be a hugely expensive exercise in futility. Among our highest near-term priorities is to finalize and then continuously update health information technology (HIT) standards that include precise data definitions (for diagnoses and treatments, for example), an architecture for aggregating data for each patient over time and across providers, and protocols for seamless communication among systems. "Finally, consumers must become much mor...
Post a Comment
Read more

gapingvoid cartoon #378

Buy your own, here.
Post a Comment
Read more

"An Affordable Fix For Modernizing Medical Records"

...from the Veterans Health Administration and Midland (TX) Memorial Hospital. I know enough about my own strengths and weaknesses to know that I'm no IT expert. But I am acutely interested in examples of people and teams thinking differently to solve long-standing, intractable problems and, for better or worse, there are lots of those to be found in the IT realm. Yesterday, it was a story about a team adding iPhone portability to MEDITECH functionality, delivering to harried physicians better access to clinical data and more productive hours in every work day. (Wow. Apple in the boardroom AND the physician lounge. Has to be an IT traditionalist's worst nightmare. But I digress...) Today, the Wall Street Journal features a story about Midland (TX) Memorial Hospital finding an affordable, open-source alternative to proprietary EMR systems : "In the push to digitize America's hospitals, Midland Memorial faced an all-too-common dilemma: a crying need for information ...
3 comments
Read more