Posts Tagged ‘healthcare’

Motivating Behavior Change: Where the rubber hits the road in health care and sustainability

Tuesday, December 6th, 2011

The panel at this morning’s conference entitled Sustainability: Don’t Market to Key Audiences- Motivate Them! was amazing. Panelists, whose work focuses on sustainability, shared lots of interesting details about what works and why.

Sustainability and health care on parallel tracks

For me, the biggest takeaway was that sustainability professionals face the same challenge that is starting to top the list at health care institutions.  That is, motivating lots of individuals to change their behavior.

In health care, the focus is on motivating patients to comply with their treatment plans.  In sustainability, it means motivating employees to make lots of small changes such as re-using and recycling both at work, and at home.

Fresh perspectives in health care

Tuesday, October 25th, 2011

The topic of the 8th annual Connected Health Symposium was timely: Driving Quality Up and Costs Down:  New Technologies for an Era of Accountability.  Nevertheless, what made it a great conference were the fresh perspectives it brought to the fore.

Measurement, analysis, and communication are imperative

Brent James, the Chief Quality Officer at Intermountain Health Care, set the stage by describing how he and his employer, Intermountain, have succeeded in simultaneously improving health care quality and decreasing costs.  He credits this achievement to the incorporation of baseline protocols into the clinical workflow, followed by continuous improvement.

Putting health care EMRs in the cloud

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011

By Barbara Bix

This morning, I attended a program at the Massachusetts Technology Leadership forum featuring John Lewis, Regional VP of Sales, of athenahealth. John’s presentation centered on his company’s  experiences of selling what he referred to as health care’s first cloud-based service.

Following on the heels of recent conversations, I’ve had with CIOs, about placing confidential patient data in the cloud; I expected John to tell us how he overcomes this objection.  Instead, he spent the morning convincing us that operating in the cloud is his company’s competitive advantage.  John supported this thesis with figures, facts, and logic.

How will Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) improve quality and reduce costs?

Thursday, December 9th, 2010

By Barbara Bix, B to B Marketing Consultant

I started working in health care in 1994 in Boston, after working in high technology since the early 1980s.  One of the first things that struck me was the relative lack of competition in the local health care industry.

Few distinctions between health care “competitors”

There was relatively little differentiation, from a prospective patient’s perspective, between hospitals–other than care level and location.  When I polled my friends and colleagues, I realized that they could distinguish between Boston’s famous tertiary hospitals and the community hospitals–but couldn’t cite differences within either group.

Social Media Breakfast (SMB15) serves up great insights and recommendations

Friday, August 7th, 2009

One of my clients, a membership organization, is facing a challenging problem. The Board would like to recruit younger members to ensure that the organization continues.

One of the issues our team has been trying to address is, “How do you attract and retain new community members—when these prospective members start out with little in common with current members?”

Luckily for me, I attended a social media breakfast in Boston(#15) this morning. There, Communispace CEO, Diane Hessan, was the last speaker at an event entitled “SMB15: The Power and Peril of Online Communities.