Skip to main content

"Groundhog Day" In Health Care

THE TAKEAWAY: Don't try to create strategic separation by informing your marketplace that you’re JUST NOW offering something that’s been commonplace for decades in the rest of the world.

So...I was driving to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport yesterday evening, when I hear a radio ad for a local hospital, one I competed with for two decades (at least when we weren’t doing joint ventures together. But I digress...) Said ad spent 60 breezy, breathless seconds praising the facility’s “new” wireless IT infrastructure.

Wow! Think about it! Wireless ANYWHERE! So visitors can GET ONLINE! And doctors and nurses can COMMUNICATE WIRELESSLY!

A fairly expensive campaign, I’m assuming, given Chicago’s media costs and the drive time placement on the biggest, baddest station of ‘em all.

And a great campaign...for 1995. And for the exactly three people on the planet who’ve never been to Starbuck’s.

Maybe the campaign’s next ad will tell me all about how they’re connected to the electrical power grid. Hey! We’ve got LIGHTS! And AIR CONDITIONING and everything!

Just when I think health care marketing and branding MIGHT be moving into a new age, something like this jolts me back to the sad reality that there's a lot of 1981-ish thinking out there.


Labels:

Comments

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

"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

Are the "Apocaholics" Wrong?

Will society avoid collapse and continue prospering? Yes, thanks to the innovators among us says zoologist and Economist editor Matt Ridley in his new book "The Rational Optimist." "...with new hubs of innovation emerging elsewhere, and with ideas spreading faster than ever on the Internet, (expect) bottom-up innovators to prevail. (Ridley's) prediction for the rest of the century: “Prosperity spreads, technology progresses, poverty declines, disease retreats, fecundity falls, happiness increases, violence atrophies, freedom grows, knowledge flourishes, the environment improves and wilderness expands.” We could still screw things up.  We could, for example, stifle innovation and trade while inflating the importance of restrictive bureaucracies. "Our progress is unsustainable...only if we stifle innovation and trade, the way China and other empires did in the past. Is that possible? Well, European countries are already banning technologies based on the preca
2 comments
Read more