mommyjenlin

As the burgeoning healthcare consumer looks at you from a price, outcomes and experience perspective, it naturally follows, well at least for me anyway, to wonder if bundled care and the price certainty that goes along with it can give you a market edge. I think it does and here’s why. Even as healthcare reform kicks into high gear in 2014, there will be a cornucopia of diversity in the payment models in the healthcare market place, and you have to be ready for all of them.   Bundled care and its price certainty can go a long way to differentiate yourself in the market to the healthcare consumers not in an ACO, Medical Home, or narrow networks, and drive profitable market share and revenue to you. It could even make you more attractive in a narrow network of providers.   And I am pretty sure employers will like it too, especially those that are self-insured. I get it that not all care can be neatly bundled into a healthcare consumer friendly package, but a lot of it can. And i...

Thursday evening at 5:15pm, I hop on the train. It's early and I've been working long hours, but I'm not going to miss Zoe's 6:30 circus show. The sun is shining under partly cloudy skies as I leave the office. By the time the El emerges above ground, around 5:40, Josh texts me to ask if I have an umbrella with me. No, I type back, why? He replies something about noisy thunder and, indeed, I see a few sprinkles outside the train. Then, about one or two stops from home (it's 5:50 now), the sky opens up with the biggest, most intense rainstorm I've ever experienced. It was positively hurricane like. The ramp leading from the Oak Park blue line station to Oak Park Avenue is covered and has walls about 2/3 of the way up each side. And yet, the rain was so wild, so horizontal, even those carrying umbrellas were soaked clear through in a matter of seconds. Josh picked me up,  but I was so thoroughly drenched I had to strip off all my clothes--undies included--the minu...

If you are like most business owners, you know how important a healthy online community is to your business’s success. Traditionally, collecting user feedback has been an expensive and time-consuming process, but now you can hear from your site visitors for free using Google Consumer Surveys. Website satisfaction surveys allow you to easily create customer satisfaction surveys in order to stay in tune with what your customers think. All you have to do is paste a small snippet of code in the HTML for your website. This will load a discreet satisfaction survey in the lower right hand corner of your website so you can get immediate feedback from your users.  Users will be asked to complete a four-question satisfaction survey. Surveys will run until they have received 500 responses and will start again after 30 days so you can track responses over time. This is currently limited to US English visitors on non-mobile devices. The default questions are free and you can customize questions...

The magic ingredient for successful channel enablement at scale is data. Imagine having the financial, operational, and behavioral data you need on partners to optimize new product launches, coverage models, and channel programs. Imagine being able to show partners — no matter how new or small or niche their focus — how other partners like them have achieved high return on investment (ROI) on their business with you. IDC's Channel Enablement Maturity Model provides a stage-by-stage guide for advancing the organizational, process, technology, and data infrastructure necessary to transform your channel marketing and sales enablement operations. The journey along IDC's Channel Enablement Maturity Model is one of evolving from a publishing/transactional framework to a process-driven one. IDC's Channel Enablement Maturity Model - Summary View Stage 1: Ad Hoc Stage 2: Opportunistic Stage 3: Repeatable Stage 4: Managed Stage 5: Optimized for Scale Key ch...

With the reformation of   healthcare in the U.S. about to hit full speed ahead, most healthcare providers will need to undertake a full detailed examination of their position in the market vies a vie their competitors.    A simple question really that is not so easily answered unless you're being honest, and are doing the market research. Positioning is not a tactic. It is a strategy. There are really only three positions you can have in a market, superior, equivalent or inferior. And just saying you have the newest hi-tech equipment, offer world-class care, revolve around the customer,    uild a new building, or produce a white paper does not, let me repeat, does not mean you hold a superior market position, or even a thought-leadership position for that matter. If your market share has not changed much over the last few years, you’re not in a superior position. If revenue has not grown, but stayed steady, you are not in a superior position. If your products, ...

As promised, I'm sharing the 3-D renderings for our new home. Our builder will be submitting the plans to the village this week, but we've warned they've very slow to approve. Anything less than 6 weeks is considered "lucky." Exterior view (houses on each side not pictured) First floor, front of the house First floor, rear of the house Living room The living room will have built-in shelves along the west wall, which you'll walk through/under to get to the dining room. This rendering isn't 100% accurate as I've moved the coat closet next to the stairs to the foyer. It makes the foyer a little more cramped, but opens up a lovely space just beyond the steps where we can (eventually) place an upright piano. This view of the dining room is from the "hallway" near the kitchen versus the living room. Family/breakfast nook There is a family room off of the kitchen where we can watch TV from a couch and eat casual meals. Pictured is the L-shaped break...

Hank and Zoe, then. At the end of a perfect Father's Day (presents, pool and movie date), as Josh relaxed with the fellow dads at a packed Scoville Park concert, I watched Zoe and Hank run around together. And I realized they've been running around together for half their lives. Right then and there I decided to replicate a wonderful photo I took of them in the same exact place 3 years ago, when they were younger than Ada is now. As I snapped it, they suggested I take their photo again when they're 11. And when they're 14, 17 and 20. Hank and Zoe, now

Just about everyone has some kind of healthcare Center of Excellence (CoE), and these programs are continually marketed by healthcare organizations. Mostly it’s marketing by screaming at the market place that you have a Center of Excellence. But, as healthcare moves to a patient-centered or consumer-centric market depending in what you believe, can hospitals continue to just claim having a Center of Excellence without price experience and outcomes data to support the claim? I think that answer is no. You can still say you have a Center of Excellence in an effort to grow share, revenue and for obtaining new payment agreements. But if that effort is not supported by price, experience and outcomes information for the healthcare consumer, then how do you prove to the newly minted healthcare insurance card carrying consumer in 2014, that your CoE is better than the one down the street? The point here is that proud pronouncements on Centers of Excellence without transparency will become a th...

I posted back in March about our adventures in house hunting . We weren't having much luck finding a bigger (but not too  much bigger) house with a master bathroom, four bedrooms, an open kitchen/family room and a finished basement. In Oak Park. In our school district. So we're building one! Sort of. Baronger Group , the same guys who own Oak Park Bath and Kitchen, buy and renovate houses in Oak Park. Typically, those houses are mid-to-high end gut rehabs designed on spec and flipped onto the MLS. But they've also shopped their projects to local realtors. Get in early, and you can customize the house to your specifications. It turns out Baronger Group was about to buy a rundown bungalow in the neighborhood we wanted to be in. It's on a quiet street. A 2 1/2 block walk to the elementary school. A 3 block walk to the train.  I called every one of the references Baronger Group sent me, toured a completed house and drove around Oak Park spying on other houses they've re...

Over the past week there has been a great discussion going on in LinkedIn in the Modern Healthcare discussion group based on a recent blog post in HMM. So for the benefit of everyone here are the questions I was asked, and my response. Why do I think price is important to the healthcare consumer? It really centers on whether or not you believe that healthcare, especially hospitals, are moving into a market that is becoming consumer-centric and dominated. Now dominated in our sense is that the healthcare consumer is becoming more actively involved in the treatment decision making process, and the price/cost side through a variety of mechanisms, whether that is higher co-pays, participating in exchanges, working for an employer that has moved to defend contribution and telling them to figure it out, etc. In the end it results in a greater awareness of the choices they make because it hits them in the pocket. Some people will pay a higher price because they believe that higher price means...

Here at IDC's CMO Advisory Service we are in the field with our 11th annual Tech Marketing Benchmarks Study. I would like to offer an invitation to participate to marketing executives across the industry.  Have you ever wondered,  "Is my marketing organization receiving enough budget to compete?" or " Exactly how much  should I be spending on marketing automation?" If so, IDC's CMO Advisory Service's benchmark survey has been helping senior marketers answer questions like these for over 10 years! Below are the essential "need to knows" around our survey and further down I'll dive into all the great value of benchmarking your marketing organization. Let's get started: What are the benefits? Complimentary copy of our 2014 Marketing Investment Planner  to benchmark your company's marketing data against the industry's data. Receive an invitation to our client only telebriefing held by IDC Analysts.  What is needed?  Email me ( sm...

Thanks to my company's corporate sponsorship of the Art Institute , I was able to go for free on Saturday. My plan had been to bring the whole family, but Zoe was recovering from a sleepover the night before and was super grumpy. Ada was thrilled to have me all to herself, and I marveled at her stamina as she walked from our house to the train, the train to the Art Institute, up and down the halls of the museum, through Millennium Park and Daley Plaza and back home. I earned my 15k step badge on my Fitbit , and my legs are twice as long as hers! When we arrived at the Art Institute, Ada marched up to the information desk and asked the way to Mary Cassatt, one of her favorite painters. We looked through all the American Art galleries and then headed to the Modern Wing, where there were a bunch of family activities, including self-portraiture. After the Art Institute, we checked out the crowds at Millennium Park's fountain and Cloud Gate--or, as Ada calls it "The Big Bean....

We all read and hear about patent engagement and experience, and what healthcare organizations think that means. But little discussion if any centers around how do you engage the patient’s family along the same lines? Regardless of what payment model-risk, value-based or bundled, full or partial capitation, in an ACO or Medical Home, the patient’s family will be involved. So from a healthcare marketing standpoint as you develop your patient and healthcare consumer experience/engagement strategy, you need to address how you will engage the family too. And for your understanding, when I write or speak about patient engagement, it’s a view along a continuum from first contact as a healthcare consumer through diagnosis, treatment, and post care. It is a far more encompassing view of engagement which heavily influences the experience that loops back to either reinforce positively or negative the level of engagement. And guess who is there at all times making comments, coloring observations ...