With so much attention on psychological marketing these days, perhaps the single most neglected trend out there is the move towards more hard-nosed information-based shopping and purchasing. New Info Shoppers are bigger than a microtrend: They represent a broad shift in the marketplace brought about by the Internet, higher education, and changing economic times, says this article from the Wall Street Journal.
If you start to use Facebook to network and informally promote your organization to your target markets, you will soon run into Facebook site rules designed to limit overt promotions. This blog posting provides some information about these limits and advice from three Facebook experts to help smooth your path.
As someone whose father succumbed to diabetes, I have seen how the disease ravages the body and leads patients down the path of countless hospital trips, daily insulin needles, and chronic comorbidities, such as heart disease and kidney disease.
Though much is known about how diet and exercise can keep the disease in check, diabetes has reached epidemic proportions in this country. The American Diabetes Association estimates nearly 24 million Americans have diabetes, and one-quarter of them don't even know they have it. Another 57 million, one-quarter of adults, are considered pre-diabetic, which means they have elevated blood glucose levels and are on the path to diabetes if they do not change their lifestyles.
As policymakers and health leaders look for ways to reduce healthcare costs through major reforms, one of the country's largest health insurers, UnitedHealthcare, has created a health plan just for diabetics and pre-diabetics.
"Diabetes is the obvious place to start," says Tom Beauregard, CEO of UnitedHealthcare's United Essentials in Hartford, CT, noting how diabetes leads to other chronic illnesses.
The new health plan combines value-based benefit design with wellness programs. The theory behind value-based benefit design, also called value-based insurance design, is that cutting copays for life-saving medications increases adherence, which in turn improves patient outcomes and saves money in the long run by averting ER visits and hospitalizations, and decreases costs associated with chronic disease.
Launched in the self-insured (large employer) market, the Diabetes Health Plan works this way: diabetics and pre-diabetics who follow their treatment plans and evidence-based guidelines receive incentives, such as free services and medications, online monitoring, wellness coaches, and self-management programs.
Depending on the patient's condition, the compliance requirements could include regular lab evaluations, exams, preventive care, and wellness program participation. By requiring compliance, UnitedHealthcare is demanding the individual take responsibility and reinforcing that individual patients are in control of their health outcomes.
UnitedHealthcare finds those eligible for the program through either claims data or a voluntary employer-offered biometric screening following an education campaign about the disease.
Including pre-diabetics in this plan could save the most money long term. Reaching a patient at the time of diagnosis has the biggest affect on patient activation and a person's potential for making lifestyle changes. By allowing pre-diabetics into the health plan, UnitedHealthcare is looking to prevent a later diabetes diagnosis and costly medical services.
"I believe someone who is identified as pre-diabetic . . . will be highly motivated to participate in a plan like this if they understand the disease," says Beauregard.
UnitedHealthcare estimates that those involved in the program will save $250-$500 per year by not paying copays for diabetes-related pharmaceuticals and it could cut the $22,000 that employers pay to care for the average diabetic annually.
Two questions will decide whether the Diabetes Health Plan is a success and whether UnitedHealthcare and its competitors try similar methods to expand diabetes programs and move into other disease states:
Will those who take part comply at a higher rate than current diabetics?
Can this health plan reduce costs and improve member health status?
"If what we see is high rates of screening, high rates of enrollment, improvements in compliance, and lower costs, then you can see this moving not just to other specialty plans, but also down market," says Beauregard.
Wellness and disease management programs have been unable to stall the diabetes epidemic so UnitedHealthcare is trying something new. Value-based benefit design has been successful in increasing medication compliance for those with chronic illness so that portion of the Diabetes Health Plan should work. Member compliance and wellness are the areas that health insurers will need to follow closely and that will decide whether UnitedHealthcare and other insurers create disease-specific health plans.
Les Masterson is senior editor of Health Plan Insider. He can be reached at lmasterson@healthleadersmedia.com.Note: You can sign up to receiveHealth Plan Insider, a free weekly e-newsletter designed to bring breaking news and analysis of important developments at health plans and other managed care organizations to your inbox.
Women age 55 and over are the fastest-growing U.S. demographic group on Facebook in the last three months, according to new data reported by Inside Facebook. The number of women on Facebook is growing faster than men in almost every age group, and women now make up 56.2% of users. Women over 55 have nearly tripled on Facebook since September to more than 717,000, and are nearly double the number of men in the same age group, according to the data.
It's time consuming, tedious, and often just plain uncomfortable for everyone involved. But, like most things in life that are unpleasant, peer review is necessary and unavoidable. +
Bolstered by a voter mandate and a Democratic majority in Congress, should President-elect Barack Obama push to make the passage of universal healthcare legislation an immediate priority when he takes office, or should Obama take a slower approach to healthcare reform by building a consensus with Republicans, health plans, and the pharmaceutical lobby? +
Shawn Evans, MD, an attending emergency physician at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, CA, shares strategies to improve patient throughput and customer service in the ED. +
Most media attention in South Carolina today is focused on the incriminating photographs of Olympic hero Michael Phelps allegedly huffing marijuana bong hits and whether the cops in Columbia will press drug possession charges against the world's greatest swimmer.
Away from the center ring of that media circus, however, there is real news breaking in the Palmetto State, and it's coming from the healthcare sector. Midday today marks the launch of the South Carolina Healthcare Quality Trust, a statewide, voluntary hospital quality collaborative to reduce hospital-acquired infections and their associated costs.
SCHQT is an awkward acronym for a promising program that creates an information-sharing portal linking the state's 65 hospitals with one another and with the major academic and research medical facilities in the state, with an emphasis on using evidence-based practices that eliminate preventable HAIs.
Rick Foster, MD, a family physician and senior vice president of quality and patient safety for the South Carolina Hospital Association, says the free information-sharing portal will be an important new tool available to every hospital in the state, no matter how small or remote. "We're making this available to small and rural and critical-access hospitals, where they may have more limited resources from an infection control standpoint or may not have direct access to infectious disease physicians," he says.
SCHQT will allow hospitals to determine what's causing the HAIs and to find and promote preventive procedures. "We are one of the states that does have required reporting for HAIs, so there is more visibility in our state as far as where we are and where we have opportunities for improvement," Foster says. "We felt like we needed to find better ways to use the data that was being reported for quality research purposes and not just for public reporting."
In addition to SCHA and its member hospitals and major health systems, the first-of-its-kind SCHQT ties in medical researchers from Clemson University, Medical University of South Carolina, and the University of South Carolina. SCHQT is coordinated through Health Sciences South Carolina, a private-public collaborative of the state's major universities and health systems, with the help of Premier Inc., the healthcare-purchasing network that has compiled a massive repository of clinical information.
According to Premier, about 1.7 million hospital patients in the United States acquired an HAI every year, costing the healthcare system more than $6.25 billion. Premier says South Carolina hospitals spent nearly $40 million last year in additional care costs because of HAIs, which increased the patient length of stay by more than eight days, or a total of 24,000 extra hospital days.
Jeanne Ward, president and CEO of Oconee Medical Center, in Seneca, SC, a 165-bed community hospital in the northwestern corner of the state, says SCHQT puts South Carolina among the vanguard in HAI control and gives rural hospitals a valuable new tool. "When you're in a smaller community, you don't have access to the epidemiologists at a larger research university or the information that some of the larger research universities have on line. It's a bit of a struggle for us," Ward says. "With this system we will be able to access all the research and best practices for preventing infections and for providing care for patients who do have an HAI, and we will be able to benchmark our performance against national and state standards."
While the focus today is on HAIs, Foster says SCHQT has the potential to provide evidence-based healthcare for other prevalent infirmities, like acute and chronic diseases such as diabetes, cancer, and heart and vascular diseases. "What we'd like to have is a broad scope of resources and tools that can help on the clinical quality and safety sides," he says.
Foster and Ward are right to be excited about SCHQT. Programs that link hospitals, share resources, and pool data will play an increasingly important role in healthcare delivery in this country as our population ages and our physician base shrinks. It's not a splashy story for the top of the news hour, but we should nevertheless stay tuned for further developments.
John Commins is the human resources and community and rural hospitals editor withHealthLeaders Media. He can be reached atjcommins@healthleadersmedia.com.
Note: You can sign up to receive HealthLeaders Media Community and Rural Hospital Weekly, a free weekly e-newsletter that provides news and information tailored to the specific needs of community hospitals.
How do you successfully advertise critical care—a service that most patients don't think about until they need it? Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) Medical Center, in Richmond, VA, recently opened its Critical Care Hospital. They also launched a campaign to raise awareness of the new services to the community.
"We know that nobody is going to say, 'Well, I think I'm going to have a critical care need; I'm going to go on down to VCU,'" says Susan Dubuque, president of VCU's agency, Neathawk Dubuque & Packett, which has offices in Richmond and Roanoke, VA.
"We really wanted to give consumers in the region a sense of comfort. That was really the key message. We didn't want to focus on the blood and guts. We wanted to focus on the fact that any day at any time in the life of any person in Virginia, a critical care need could arise. And though you're not prepared for it isn't it wonderful to know that someone is?"
The multi-integrated campaign started with an internal communications effort followed by an external campaign that focused on four critical care specialties: burn, heart, cancer, and NICU. "We really tried to highlight the service areas from a product angle," says Dubuque, "and the fact that that all of those services are right there in one place."
The strategy behind the imagery was to provide various views of the types of patients that at some point might potentially need care at the Critical Care Hospital. This can be seen in an ad for the facility's burn center, which features a firefighter, and in an ad for the facility's NICU, which features an expectant couple.
"We know that despite all our best preventative efforts there are going to be babies born prematurely," says Marcos Irigaray, vice president of strategy and marketing for VCU. "That's why we're here, for the unexpected."
Kandace McLaughlin Doyle is an editor with HealthLeaders magazine. Send her Campaign Spotlight ideas at kdoyle@healthleadersmedia.com If you are a marketer submitting a campaign on behalf of your facility or client, please ensure you have permission before doing so.
The U.S. healthcare system is on life support because it costs too much and saps economic vitality, achieves far too little return on investment, and isn't distributed equitably, according to this commentary published in the New York Times. The piece calls for a new healthcare business model based on "disruptive innovation," with advances in medical technology and research paving the way for better and more effective individualized care without increased costs.
The abrupt collapse of Tom Daschle's cabinet nomination undercuts President Obama's mission to expand healthcare by depriving him of a well positioned architect for a big legislative campaign and leaving him without a backup plan. Daschle's decision to withdraw his candidacy for secretary of health and human services could slow the president's drive to reshape the nation's healthcare system as the White House searches for a replacement, analysts said. But the White House insisted that Daschle's departure would not stop the effort to cover the uninsured and rein in health costs.
The Loudoun County, VA, Board of Supervisors has voted to reject a proposal by HCA Virginia to build a hospital in Loudoun, capping more than five years of fierce debate over how best to meet the rising demand for medical care. After an intense campaign by Inova Health System to prevent a competitor from taking root in Loudoun, the board voted against the proposal to build a 164-bed acute-care facility. The decision was the latest development in a long-running battle between nonprofit Inova and the for-profit hospital network HCA.
