Health Care Strategist

From LinkedIn:

How might health care providers use technology to turn customers' mobile phones into information displays and ordering devices? A few years ago, the NY Times outlined how retailers are doing it... "(Designer Norma) Kamali is at the forefront of a technological transformation coming to many of the nation’s retailers. They are determined to strengthen the link between their physical stores and the Web, and to use technology to make shopping easier for consumers and more lucrative for themselves. ... Cisco Systems, the supplier of networking equipment and services for the Internet, is also a leader in the field. The company’s Mobile Concierge system is capable of connecting customers’ smartphones to retailers’ wireless networks — so a shopper could type “Cheez Whiz” into a cellphone, then pinpoint its location in the store." Ms. Kamali's boutique installed a technology called ScanLife , "allowing people to scan bar codes on merchandise and obtain details ...

An article at hhnmag.com offers hospitals 5 steps to becoming more consumer friendly. If you still think there's a secret sauce to your hospital becoming more "consumer friendly," these 5 steps are as good a place to start as any.  Unfortunately, it's a little like that old Steve Martin comedy bit where he says he'll teach you how to be rich. The first step is to go find a million dollars. Step 1 from the article is realizing that "...a Medicare beneficiary with chronic conditions is different from a young mom who brings her kids in for an annual check-up." This is market segmentation for beginners, and, yes, one size decidedly does not fit all. I'm sure your marketing team's been saying this for a while. Steps 2-5: have a strategy, metrics, a champion and resources. OK. Hard to argue with any of those. But those things, alone or together, won't overcome culture. They're important components to be sure, but insufficient w...

I've had this post sitting around in draft form for far too long and it's time to get it off my chest. Several years ago, MSNBC commentator Dylan Ratigan interviewed Umair Haque, author of The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business , founder of Bubblegeneration, Director of the Havas Media Lab and blogger at the Harvard Business Review. Though the topic wasn't healthcare, there was much for healthcare leaders to ponder. Haque draws a clear contrast between productive wealth and destructive wealth.  Both count toward Gross Domestic Product (GDP) but only the former really contributes . Says Umair, "It’s easier to make money in the short-term through exploitation and the extraction and much more labor intensive with a higher failure rate and a much greater degree of challenge to actually advance and create something that is new and different and differentiates in its creation of value. “So to me, this is a crisis that is about f...

"Your rearview mirror is so small and your windshield is so large because what lies ahead is much more important than the past." (@CHRISVOSS) What can we say about the future?  It's uncertain and the end is always near. (Jim Morrison)  The future is much like the present, only longer.  (Dan Quisenberry)  The future is here.  It's just not widely distributed yet. (William Gibson)  Uncertain. As near as tomorrow. Long duration.  Limited (and uneven) distribution. Think about how hospital strategic plans account for future competitor decisions.   If they do at all,  it's little more than simple extrapolation of past performance, a technique which, though understandable since that's where the data reside, is nothing more than crafting strategy in a vacuum. It's much easier to track competitor performance retrospectively than to forecast future decisions. Volume trends, market share, patient satisfaction, quality indicators, financia...