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Win A British Virgin Island Vacation-Contest Ends 2.6.10

1/25/2010

Win a British Virgin Island vacation from our affiliate partners at Gene Smart!

Share your most inspiring way to live abundantly in 2010. You'll gain inspiration by viewing favorite ways shared by others! One lucky entrant will be selected to win a vacation package for two at the Gene Smart Living Abundantly Week at the luxury Scrub Island Resort. This amazing week, hosted by Dr. Ski Chilton, author of The Gene Smart Diet, will be held April 15 – 19, 2010. Visit http://scrubisland.com/bvispecial.

Everyone entered will receive their starter list of 2010 Ways to Live Abundantly free, just for sharing.

To enter, please click on the 2010 Ways to Live Abundantly text link located on the bottom of the following page: http://www.BACMedicalMarketing.com/Gene-Smart.html.

Prize Eligibility: This contest is open to all people at least 18 years of age who reside in the United States. To read the complete, official contest rules, please visit http://apps.facebook.com/contestshq/contests/15230/rules.

Contest Ends: February 06, 2010 @ 09:59 PM (PST).

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Marketing Without The Frustration

1/25/2010

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Do you often get frustrated with the outcome of your marketing efforts? Most of the time, do you get lackluster results rather than what you expect? Even with a marketing campaign supported by real data gathered methodically and conscientiously, do you most often than not fall prey to promotional aids that are created on a whim? Instead of planning carefully and strategically, is your impulse to run promotions based on the latest media trend? If you answered yes to any or all of the above, you are not alone!

This is especially true nowadays when you are working on a limited budget for your marketing campaigns. Just because business is slow, you tend to go for media trends that may be offering a great rate or even those that are fashionable, hoping that these media aids will help get their practice out of the doldrums.

However, although these marketing activities can help you gain attention from your target audience, they lack what it takes to build brand value. Instead of focusing on giving more meaning to your marketing efforts, you tend to go for something that would give you instant attention for quick repair of your situation. It is like applying first-aid for temporary relief. Your pain would be taken care of for now, but it will not last very long.

So rather than go for instant marketing aids to attract attention, why not make your marketing campaigns more meaningful? Instead of putting more weight on instant sales, you have to work on creating stable relationships with your target audience.

Marketing campaigns such as pamphlets and brochures may mean immediate results that can increase your sales, but it should not stop there. Instead, aim on encouraging more repeat business from your patients so you can help your practice survive in your chosen field. You have to capitalize on what you have to offer and make sure that you build brand value from these benefits.

How do you do this then? By focusing your efforts on defining clearly your target market and the right message to give them. Your marketing campaign definitely would have more meaning to your target audience if the message you give them is what they are looking for. Having the right message for the right target audience goes a long way in having a meaningful and effective marketing strategy that would bring in a huge difference between having a successful practice and a failed one. By providing your target audience with the right message, you are able to help your patients make a wise decision whenever they engage your services.

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Win A British Virgin Island Vacation!

1/18/2010

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Remembering The Legacy Of Martin Luther King, Jr.

1/18/2010

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Another Martin Luther King Day is here again and, as usual, Dr. King's written and spoken words of 40-50 years ago continue to speak to America's current problems. King helped lead the successful civil rights movement of the late 1950s and '60s in our country. Many people despised him for what he was doing in trying to free African-Americans as individuals and as a nation from the bondage of racial prejudice, segregation, and social injustice. They called him dangerous, troublemaker, unpatriotic, a communist.

King was a true prophet. Today, King would be calling on individuals, churches and government to work for the common good with special emphasis on ministering to the needs of the least among us. His detractors would call him a socialist.

In a sermon excerpt from his book, “Strength to Love”, King said, "We must honestly recognize that truth is not to be found either in traditional capitalism or in Marxism. Each represents a partial truth. Historically, capitalism failed to discern the truth in collective enterprise and Marxism failed to see the truth in individual enterprise. Nineteenth-century capitalism failed to appreciate that life is social and Marxism failed, and still fails, to see that life is individual and social. The Kingdom of God is neither the thesis of individual enterprise nor the antithesis of collective enterprise, but a synthesis which reconciles the truth of both."

It seems Dr. King was suggesting our economic system, devoid of greed, should be composed of the best ideas from capitalism and socialism. The civil rights movement could not have succeeded without government-changing laws. Structural injustice in our socio-economic system can only be changed for the better via government. We the people, collectively, are the government.

Tragically, at the peak of his career, King was slain in Memphis, on April 4, 1968. Not only did King die that day, so did a large part of America in terms of hope for equality among mankind.

Though he has passed on, King's legacy continues: The fact that his birthday is a national holiday and that a black man, Barack Obama, is President of the United States serve as living proof.

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How To Measure Medical Safety

1/11/2010

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American’s obsession with safety. It’s even more important than quality. But how do we measure it? Safety metrics are easy when it comes to fields like transportation or infant formulas where the expected rates of death and injury are supposed to be zero. So we make this the expected benchmark and try to get these rates to be as low as possible.

But with medical care, the picture is far more complicated. In this case, the outcome as a result of an illness or condition in the absence of medical treatment is EXPECTED to be death and injury (i.e., permanent disability). This is your benchmark. Therefore, it’s often difficult to determine whether a death or injury in this context was the result of treatment failure or it was iatrogenic (as a result of treatment itself) or a combination the two and whether, in retrospect, things could have been done differently that may have improved the odds for the patient.

Notice, I didn’t use the term “preventable”. Medical care does not prevent anything. It maximizes the odds ratios for patient morbidity and mortality. I prefer terms like “this treatment will reduce the likelihood” instead of “this treatment will prevent” such and such. Treatment with bisphosphonates will reduce the likelihood of a fracture. The use of daily aspirin will reduce the chances of a heart attack or stroke. There is however, a remaining chance that a fracture or heart attack will occur despite these treatments.

And every single medical treatment has the potential for iatrogenic harm. The use of blood thinners to reduce the risk of clots in the lower extremities increases the risk of bleeding. The use of invasive monitoring equipment will improve that ability for physicians to make treatment decisions but at the risk of infections, bleeding, and other complications. Ideally, multiple complex treatments are applied in various combinations that try to maximize the odds for recovery while minimizing the likelihood of a poor outcome though this is never assured.

Decades ago, people understood these simple concepts. But through a combination of the success of medical care, the growth of the tort industry, and American obsession with safety, we have come to have unrealistic expectations regarding safety in medical care. One of the biggest reasons for this delusion is that far too many people have lumped medical errors, iatrogenic complications, poor outcomes, and non-medical (i.e., administrative or systemic) errors together into one big messy pile.

This was evident when the Institutes of Medicine (IOM) released a study in 1999 that found that up to 98,000 patients die each year as a result of medical errors (they even included “to err” in the title of the report). But this figure was significantly revised when the methodology of the IOM study was re-evaluated. The IOM study simply looked at hospital charts and depended on the conclusion of the reviewer to determine whether an error was present. However, the accuracy of such methodology was found to be highly variable on further evaluation. It’s like watching two Monday morning ESPN analysts slug it out. Was the interception a result of a bad throw, a bad decision, good defense, a mistake by the receiver, or bad luck, or a combination? Different “experts” can see it differently. This type of study is not helpful (except for lawyers who still quote the study on their web sites).

Amazingly, few people make the distinction between systemic errors and poor outcomes as a result of medical treatment. Systemic errors are errors that should never happen due to things like poor equipment design or defects, improper equipment maintenance and usage, wrong site, wrong procedure, wrong patient errors, poor training, and mismatched blood typing. Unlike medical complications, these adverse outcomes are completely preventable and have little to do with actual medical practice and more to do with administrative problems. Yet, studies and the media continue to lump preventable systemic/administrative adverse events in with medical complications like infections, bleeding, and medication reactions that will occur even under the safest of situations.

The first step is to separate systemic errors from medical adverse outcomes because the expectations and approaches to each can be quite different. Systemic errors are approached much the same way the FAA approaches aircraft accidents. Based on a root cause analysis, equipment is redesigned and/or new or revised procedures are implemented to try and prevent future errors.

Complications as a result of medical treatment requires an understanding and acceptance that this the trade-off we make in order to aggressively treat illness and that a certain finite level of risk will exist even under the most ideal set of circumstances until and unless new technologies or practices are developed to reduce this risk. With this in mind it is more appropriate to measure rates of complications related to the best known techniques in order to set a benchmark.

But even the use of complications or mortality and morbidity rates can be misleading in that different hospitals tend to treat different subsets of patients who may be sicker or healthier than the general population.

Some suggest that better metrics might be how well care is coordinated, how closely evidence-based medical guidelines are adhered to and how short the wait times are. But no matter how we ultimately measure medical safety, we need to start by understanding that there is a significant difference between system/administrative errors and medical complications.

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Allowing Doctors To Apologize

1/4/2010

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“I’m sorry for your loss.” When we say this to someone, we express our sympathy for them. It’s a social bonding and humanistic mechanism that strengthens ties. And it’s polite and the right thing to do, except in our over-lawyered America where an apology can be seen as an admission of guilt in a court of law.

Which is ridiculous since sympathy does not at all imply causation even if the involved parties are closely linked (obviously saying you are sorry for the loss of a loved one does not mean that you caused their death even if you were the doctor involved in their care). Nor does one’s personal beliefs of guilt and acceptance of responsibility imply actual guilt or causation. That’s something for the court to decide based on the evidence. And our legal system is supposed to have this principle about people not incriminating themselves (but in reality this is extremely limited in scope and applies only to a prohibition against forced testimony while everything else is admissible).

However, this is starting to change. A state bill filed in Massachusetts would “make the expression of regret, sympathy or compassion inadmissible as evidence in a lawsuit.” But, of course, the Massachusetts Academy of Trial Attorneys oppose this bill.

Why? Because apologizing for their mistakes and/or sympathizing when there is a bad outcome reduces the likelihood that the doctor will get sued and improves the chances that it will lead to a quick resolution. This is good for everybody except the trial lawyers whose success depends upon lengthy and expensive litigation.

Currently over half the states have some type of apology law that prevents sympathy from being used against a physician in court. This appears to be part of an even bigger nationwide effort to essentially bypass the broken, expensive, and inefficient legal system to resolve cases and get compensation to injured parties in a faster and less expensive way. Again, this is not good for the trial lawyers.

If anything, the fact that a law is needed to provide protection against such abuses allowed in court is illustrative of just how broken the current legal system is and how malleable and susceptible it is to abusive legal practices.

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