Breaking Up Is Hard To Do...

...says the song. Brand breakups resemble the fallout from failed romantic relationships, says Time.

Brand break-ups are worst when former fans (cults, anyone?) become angry at their one-time favs for misbehaving...and with themselves for ever believing in the brand.

"The people who lashed out the most...tended to see themselves reflected in the brands they once cherished and got the most hurt when the relationships ended as a result. “Those who felt that the brands were theirs had the most to lose essentially,” says (study author Allison) Johnson, a business professor at University of Western Ontario. “They became those same brands' biggest enemies.”'

In short, it's the feeling of being made the fool that motivates some brand exes to turn mean. They'll trash the offender just to provide the necessary disassociation.

So, yes, build those brand loyalists. Just don't ever let 'em down.

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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...

gapingvoid cartoon #378

Buy your own, here.

"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 ...

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