Showing posts with label tools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tools. Show all posts

March 28, 2012

5,000th Application Milestone

In April, 2012, CarePrecise will celebrate having built and released our 5,000th database application and version release! Actually, we will have released 5,049 (and maybe more) separate software applications, including state-by-state NPIdentify Desktop apps, CarePrecise Access sets, customized CarePrecise Select sets, CP ListMaker version upgrades, custom applications, and specialized MEDICAlistings marketing lists. In all, we will have distributed software and datasets representing nearly a terabyte of data and code since 2008. We're a privately held company and we don't release financials or our exact number of users, but we can say that it's between 500 and 1,000. And we love every single one!

October 10, 2011

Phone Messaging: New Channel to Physicians

It's wildly hit-and-miss -- much like email spam -- but marketers are increasingly using bulk text messaging to penetrate the armor cladding of physician offices. And it's a wide open opportunity; physician office phone numbers are openly published, unlike email addresses. Fax numbers are available too (CarePrecise provider data includes both phone and fax numbers, up to four numbers per record, and we know that it is widely used for marketing to physicians), but "faxpam" doesn't have the same high-tech glamor. Unlike a fax broadcast, text messaging allows marketers to embed a live link to a web landing page, as well as an instantly accessible means for recipients to opt out, making bulk SMS marketing just a little bit more respectable. (Ever tried to get a faxpammer to stop? Ha!)

So what's the difference between bulk SMS cold-calling and plain old spam? Not much, except that it's newer and less fraught with sleaze. And here's something more: It's not free, so spammers can't just set up a computer and start sending 100 million spam messages a day at essentially no cost. Text messaging to phones requires that you have an SMS gateway, or an account with a service provider who has one. These are available to bulk senders, but at a price. Okay, it's not exactly postage, but it's at least a price.

Among the numerous offerings for bulk SMS gateway and software services are Mobomix and TXTwire. Both offer essentially unlimited sending with premium accounts, but both enforce opt-in requirements. That is, you can't just upload a database of phone numbers, such as the 5 million or so in the CarePrecise database, and start texting. Instead, these services require that you are sending only to your own customers or others who have explicitly said, "Yeah, okay, text me spam."

Of course, there's always a workaround. Another company, SMScountry, offers an Excel plug in that lets you send personalized text messages. While they have a similar anti-spam policy, the way the system works would make it difficult to police. As with all bulk SMS systems, it isn't particularly easy for a recipient to contact the carrier to complain. The carrier backbone for SMS is a bit primitive compared with that of email, and there are fewer hooks for filtering messages by the carriers, should they ever want to do what ISPs are doing about email spam. It's pretty much up to the owner of the gateway.

In the war between marketers and physicians, both sides escalate as new weapons or defenses arise. A fax isn't likely to ever see a doctor's spectacles, but that same unreachable physician isn't really that unreachable if you can get his email address or phone number. Naturally, it helps to have her mobile number rather than just the office phone, for obvious reasons. But if you've got a product to sell to docs, any opening is a huge gaping hole, and, even if the text message gets converted to a computer-voiced voice mail message, and, even if only the smallest percentage reach a bona fide phyz, maybe paying $60 a month for a bulk gateway account with few limits sounds good to you. And a good many of those published numbers are cell phones, some portion of them presumably reaching right into a doctor's pocket.

Bulk SMS has its Whitehat side, of course. Services that allow you to enter your customers' account info and send text billing notices, patient appointment reminders, among a host of other applications, are opening up the commercial use of phone messaging. I opted in for a J.C. Penney's coupon texting service, and I use it.

But let's say you've got a nice big customer list, folks who freely gave you their phone numbers (long before the advent of SMSpam, but still...). Can you send em all a coupon, or a new product announcement, or an offer of a free EHR assessment? I want to say no, but we send these same customers more-or-less "unsolicited" email, at least in the sense that they never explicitely said "Send me your coupons," but something more like "Send me product update notices via your monthly newsletter." That phone number was optional, right? Houston, we have achieved opt-in.

Certain advantages of smartphones, such as the ability to blacklist messagers, are a helpful control. The barriers to entry are currently very high for an SMSpammer who wants to set up his own unrestricted gateway, so he'll be using these third party services and, perhaps, have to behave himself. But look for text marketing to grow wildly in the near future.

Check out our page on Marketing to Healthcare Providers.

September 21, 2011

Nifty Licensing Agency Contact Resource

Want to know who the various healthcare provider licensing entities are for a given state? Palmetto GBA has made that a piece of cake now. Their new database of licensing requirements (primarily for use by DME suppliers) includes the licensing bodies for each state. For example, here's what they show for New York:

1)New York State Board of Pharmacy
Phone: 518-474-3817 extension 130 extension 130
Web: http://www.op.nysed.gov/prof/pharm/
- Registered Pharmacy Establishment Certificate
2)New York State Board of Pharmacy, Office of the Professions
Phone: 518-474-3817 extension 250 extension 250
Web: http://www.op.nysed.gov/prof/od/
- Ophthalmic Dispenser License
3)New York State Board of Respiratory Therapy
Phone: 518-474-3817 extension 120 extension 120
Web: http://www.op.nysed.gov/prof/rt/
- Respiratory Therapist
4)New York State Education Department, Office of the Professions
Phone: 518-474-3817 extension 591 extension 591
Web: http://www.op.nysed.gov/prof/
- Optometrist License
- Physician License
5)New York Department of Health
Phone: 518-402-1016
Web: http://www.nyhealth.gov/
- Ambulatory Surgical Center
- Home Health License
- Hospital License
- Nursing Home Administrator License
- Nursing Home License

Another table shows the type of provider with a link to the number (as listed above), and still another nifty feature lets you choose a healthcare product or service from a dropdown, and jumps you to a listing of the various licensing requirements. Kudos!

March 8, 2011

Patients Want Their Providers Online

The second-annual study from Intuit Health, the Health Care Check-Up Survey, found that 73% of Americans surveyed would use secure online tools to access lab results, request appointments, pay medical bills, and communicate with their doctor's office. CarePrecise began building web portals for healthcare providers a few years ago, and has seen a rise in interest from providers, who want to be able to point patients to written information in the controlled environment of their websites. Providers are also looking at adding scheduling applications, and some are participating in PHRs (patient health record portals). Read the Information Week article.

December 17, 2010

Marketing: Top 5 Web Trends for 2011

Even in this economy, price competition isn't the answer. It can eviscerate the bottom line, and associates our brand with bottom feeders.  Instead, in 2011 marketers will be learning to give something else to our prospects and customers.  Social media, content push, convergence, social objects and service -- these five emerging trends are covered in an article on OpenForum.com, and I hope you'll read it. But here's the gist:
  1. Social Media. No, it's not Socialism. Yet. But the communities aggregated by Facebook are the 2011 equivalent of proletariat power. No longer are our gripes and kudos heard by only a few co-workers in the lunchroom, but by hundreds or thousands of our closest friends. And their closest friends. And their closest friends. B2B and B2C marketers are both learning the power of chatter. While waiting for the curtain to rise at a recent entertainment event, audience members all seemed to sort-of know one another. In clusters around the room, it became clear that almost all 150 or so attendees had responded to a Facebook invitation.
  2. Content Still Rules, but... We've all learned that developing rich online content is key to getting traffic and building credibility with our market. But much of that content just sits there. We've done the Email Newsletter thing, to push content out to our community. Tweets are the next step, using brief and much more frequent touches to keep our customers and prospects close. And tweets don't get your email domain blacklisted.
  3. Converge and Hybridize. There's the web site. And then there's the Facebook page. It's time to pull them together in a seamless environment that makes interaction integral to the web experience of all your visitors. And it's more than just putting an F button on your home page. (What? You still don't have an F button on your home page?)
  4. Widgets and Web Tools and Mascots - Oh, My! They're called social objects -- little bundles of clever or cute or useful that get picked up and sent around and pinned to other people's pages. Maybe it's a relevant cartoon or really funky-looking lolcat, or a widget that lets your visitors grab a chunk of your content for their own site or Facebook page. The point is to get other people giving your stuff away for you, just like the sample lady at the grocery store. Only for free; once you've covered development costs, that is.
  5. Serving is the New Selling. I can remember the exact day that I decided to start giving extreme customer service. It was just after I'd had a great customer service experience myself, with a vendor that made such an impression on me that I've stuck with them ever since -- three years now. It costs me absolutely nothing to make every customer feel smart, attractive, rich, famous and wanted. The actual content of a service event does use up a little more time, and sometimes I even make a follow-up call (which really blows their minds). But the first result is that I love doing it, and service events have become a true joy, and the ultimate result is that the bottom line proves that it works for the customers, too. Now, instead of spending time calling on leads, I spend my time with customers -- including the ones who are just downloading the freebies or have questions. I still have to get the word out, of course, but I can put more resources into direct mail and web advertising designed just to start a conversation. We're entering an age of smarter selling that's all about creating relevance and utility for our prospects and customers, and we're leaving the age of selling "lifestyles." Now, when we get that first contact, we have to listen for the person's existing patterns, to learn how we can help them get more value from the way they are already doing business, or living their lives. It's not about generating warm fuzzies, but about delivering real value -- the stuff that our price-competing competitors don't have any of.
Do these five ideas all seem to run together? Naturally. Social media has helped to evolve our understanding of content and service. We're learning to be there for our markets, in every sense of that expression, rather than driving the markets to us.

November 22, 2010

Again: Why Is It You Don't Protect My Health Data?

Why do health plans and providers refuse to secure sensitive data when encrypting it costs nothing at all?


According to a study out of HHS that tracks healthcare data breaches, laptop computer theft was the most prevalent cause of data theft, involved in 24% of breaches. Desktop computers accounted for 16% of the breaches. Physical security is cited as an issue; had computers been kept behind locked doors, fewer would have been stolen. But that's just silly. You can't be locking and unlocking office doors all day long, and keeping a laptop in a locked room is sort of not the whole point of a portable computer.

So, why wasn't the data encrypted? "Ah," you say, "Let me explain our reasons: (1) encryption isn't really secure, (2) it costs money and wastes my time, (3) difficult to administer in an organization, and (4) I could be forced to type in my password at gunpoint."

Well, (1), wrong. Encryption is really secure; the chances of anyone being able to break modern layered encryption are somewhere between zero and non-existent* (except for pure random chance, unfortunately, like when they guess your password is hGRw5k9oBn28, or Let's1andallGo(straight)2Shaneequah'sHouse). Despite what the movies would have you believe, random strings and big long phrases with numbers and punctuation are easy to remember, but astronomically difficult to guess, even using brute force cracking software. ILoveMyCat isn't.

And, (2), wrong. Once setup on a laptop, an "encrypted volume" is just like another hard drive, and to use data on it you simply type in a password. No wasted time (oh, well, alright, however long it takes you to type in a handful of characters -- how bad are your keyboarding skills?).

And, (3), wrong. Are you just OK with losing my data, or is work too hard for you? And that old saw about not being able to administer open source software is inapplicable. Who cares if an admin can tweak and fiddle with the copies of copies of copies of redundantly off-site backed-up data that some lower-down has on his laptop?

And, (4), wrong again. The fear of being held at gunpoint while you type in a password for a file your attacker can see on your computer is simply a waste of good adrenaline. Modern encryption software provides full deniability, such that even the sensitive files themselves are invisible; which is to say, they are hidden encrypted inside another file, one that opens to reveal some non-sensitive content when you use one password, and the sensitive stuff when you use another password. Unless the attacker can see inside your head, he doesn't know the data is even there.

And it's free. Yup. Free, open source, downloadable, and you can have it on your laptop and running beautifully in minutes. We don't have any connection with the product, but we've been using it for years. It's called TrueCrypt. Setup took all of 15 minutes. Five years ago. If you don't use it and you lose my healthcare data, I'm going to be really ticked.

Okay, end of rant. Until the next stupid data breach.

*Alright, let's just say that the odds against are so unfavorable that even the most seasoned hackers won't take the bet.

October 8, 2010

New Web-based Tool Improves Chronic Care

Say you're a physician caring for diabetes and heart disease patients. Would you like to have a tireless chronic care expert elf poring over your patients' records every night, comparing their care with evidence-based practices, looking for things you might not notice? Kaiser Permanente's lead author of an American Journal of Managed Care study, Adrianne Feldstein, MD, thinks maybe you should. "Patients in the U.S. receive only about half of the preventive and follow-up care now recommended by national guidelines," says Dr. Feldstein. A new web-based Panel Support Tool (PST) extracts information from the electronic medical record and compares it to care recommended by national guidelines. Read the article in Healthcare IT News.