Texting for Compliance
Rob Havasy blogs and tweets for Partners Healthcare, the massive Boston-based network of hospitals and clinics. Earlier this month, he blogged about changes made in January this year to HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996). These changes have gone mainly unnoticed by many in the pharma and biotech markets, but could be ...
Ctrl+P = Print Right Ear
After years of living in the world of academics and industrial designers, 3D printing is now regularly making news in the world of healthcare. When you think about this technology, it is ideal for healthcare. Each of us is subtly different. What could be better than being able quickly and efficiently to make custom products to ...
More Power to P4P
The New York Times reported last week that the CBO was pleasantly surprised to announce that there seems to be “a sharp and persistent slowdown in the growth of healthcare costs.” As a result, it has revised its forecasts of the cost of Medicare and Medicaid. By 2020, its new forecast spend on these two ...
Panning for Gold in Career Postings
Career postings are like little gold mines for CI. Recruiting departments of most firms are unaware how valuable job descriptions can be to their competitors. To entice the best candidates, all too often postings give away invaluable tidbits on the inside structure and workings of a company … who this job reports to, what is ...
Google and Health and Kurzweil
Google will pull the plug on its version of a personal health record (PHR) service, Google Health, on January 1, 2013. Both Microsoft and Google jumped into the PHR market some five years ago. This was far too early for anyone to understand what incentives would make healthy individuals spend their time entering personal health ...
Walmart and Free Healthcare
Who would have thought that Walmart would be leading the healthcare market to test radical new ideas for high value healthcare coverage! Over the past decade, it has often been large employers who have been the most creative in trying out new “value” ideas for health plans. Back in 2000, Fortune 500 companies lead the ...
Today is NOT Today!
Today is NOT Today! As CI professionals we all have to look for “blind spots,” assumptions about the competitive environment that are wrong because we have preconceived and incorrect ideas about how a market is evolving. The classic example in my mind is that of Ken Olsen and Digital Equipment Corporation. Olsen, CEO of DEC, ...
West Nile Virus … Bitten by an Anomaly
A suggestion … always look for the facts that do NOT fit together when you undertake a project, what I call ANOMALIES. Making sense of them can often lead to unexpected insights. I did a job a few years back for a US client looking at West Nile Virus. I had to look at the ...
Competitive Intelligence Lessons from Apple
This is a true story by Mike Ratcliffe. I have just recovered my wife’s lost iPhone using the free iCloud tracking App, my wife’s iPad and two police officers! It is also a great CI case story as Apple’s tracking service gave me the intelligence to proactively make decisions before my competitor, the person who ...
Employer Health Plans set to Benefit from ACOs
Large health plans are developing new innovative plan designs for the employer segment of the market through partnerships with regional ACOs with the promise of lower premiums and potential ramifications on formulary designs. The managed care market looks like another round of innovation. This time thanks to health plans and Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs). Since ...