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"Raise Your Hand If You Love Your Cable Company"

Ha Ha. A question asked and answered, from David Houle's Evolution Shift blog. No hands raised but lots of laughter.

Yes, the cable industry is ripe for disintermediation, with its inexplicable, customer-unfriendly processes. The way it forces us to buy lots when all we want is a little. Good riddance. It would have happened a long time ago were the industry's franchises not protected by cadres of dimwitted local regulators.

But let's rephrase: "Raise your hand if you love your HOSPITAL." How many hands raised now? Maybe a few, but not many.

"They love us! They need us! We're irreplaceable!" Umm-hmm.

Hospital leaders had better start confronting the Napster generation's eagerness to junk business models unable (or unwilling) to offer immediate, just-in-time information, radical openness and transparency, and services bundled (or un-bundled as the case may be) in new and creative ways.

Disintermediation in health care? It's already begun. Measure it by the sum total of all the revenue streams given up by hospitals as they declare after the fact, "Oh well. It wasn't really a core competency anyway." Huge revenue streams, even entire service lines, all gone after a half-hearted fight.

Measure it by all the nimble industry newcomers who, not mired in some "edifice complex," get busy creating one customer-pleasing innovation after another.

Hospitals could do all that. Just like the cable companies, they choose not to, at their own peril.


Comments

Bravo, remarkable idea

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