Attention all healthcare PR and marketing people: Let’s join together in promoting vaccines and the truth about vaccines. They save lives. Forbes contributor Tara Healle states it extremely well with “Ben Carson Doesn’t Get It: All Our Vaccines Prevent Death.”

Dr. Ben Carson during last night’s presidential debates.

What Healle finds especially disheartening is that two physicians who know better, or should know better, chose to pander during last night’s Republican presidential debate on the subject of vaccines. Dr. Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon, made the claim that while some vaccines are very important and save lives, some do not fit into this category. Carson suggested there should be some discretion in the use of these vaccines.

As Haelle points out, all of the vaccines on the CDC list for childhood vaccinations have the demonstrated potential to prevent conditions that can lead to death.

Another physician running for president, added his view. Rand Paul, an ophthamologist, said he’s all in favor of vaccines, but also in favor of freedom. Healle’s response:

“I’m for freedom too, Rand Paul. I’m for freedom from disease. I’m in favor of ensuring that my child and those in my community don’t get sick from measles and die because fear has led others in the community not to vaccinate their children.”

As a Minneapolis healthcare PR and marketing firm, we want to help get the word out. We commit to making vaccines a regular focus of this blog and will work in other ways to combat the unscientific disinformation out there about the effectiveness and safety of vaccines.

One of my good friends, a physician in Los Angeles, contracted polio as a child in the 1950’s. My friend has surmounted many difficulties, and is an inspiration to many, including myself. He is offended by untruths about vaccines. If only the polio vaccine had been around when he was a child!

Let’s not let the science doubters, including physicians running for president, carry this debate. People of reason need to speak out, loudly and often.

Not much competition among Medicare Advantage plans, according to The Commonwealth Fund.

Is there no competition in Medicare Advantage plans? Not according to a new study by The Commonwealth Fund. As a Minneapolis healthcare PR agency, we like competition. In the case of these privatized Medicare plans, it has the potential to drive prices down and offer more choice and better service and quality to health plan members. And, of course, as a healthcare PR and marketing firm, competition provides more opportunities for us to help get out the message.

From the abstract:

“Competition among private Medicare Advantage (MA) plans is seen by some as leading to lower premiums and expanded benefits. But how much competition exists in MA markets? Using a standard measure of market competition, our analysis finds that 97 percent of markets in U.S. counties are highly concentrated and therefore lacking in significant MA plan competition. Competition is considerably lower in rural counties than in urban ones. Even among the 100 counties with the greatest numbers of Medicare beneficiaries, 81 percent do not have competitive MA markets. Market power is concentrated among three nationwide insurance organizations in nearly two-thirds of those 100 counties.”

Is the public served by this situation? Yes, says Clare Krusing, a spokeswoman for America’s Health Insurance Plans, a Washington trade association. Quoted in The New York Times, Krusing said, “Seniors are overwhelmingly satisfied with Medicare Advantage because of the wide range of coverage options available and the overall value these plans provide. This market remains competitive, particularly with Medicare Advantage plans demonstrating improved care delivery for beneficiaries compared to traditional Medicare.”

For more on The Commonwealth Fund study, go here.

Reading an old profile in The New Yorker made me think about what Alice Waters can teach healthcare PR and marketing. Alice Waters, who today won the National Humanities Medal from President Obama, opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California in 1971, with the idea she and her partners would provide a dining experience like that of a dinner party at home, with generosity and attention to detail, and a commitment to seasonal, local and sustainable food sourcing. While all that might seem like a commonplace in today’s restaurant scene, the fact is unmistakable that Waters started a revolution against the bland, industrial food machine that held sway at that time.

But Water’s vision is larger than a great dining experience. As the article explains, “Her vision is rooted in the romantic Berkeley politics that she practiced before starting her restaurant, Chez Panisse, with a ten-thousand-dollar loan twenty-seven years ago. She believes in concentric circles of social responsibility, with the reformed carrot in the backyard garden insensibly improving the family around the dinner table, the reformed family around the dinner table insensibly improving the small neighborhood merchants they shop with, the reformed neighborhood merchants improving their city, and so right on, ever upward and outward, but with the reformed carrot always there, the unmoved (though crisply cooked) mover in the center.”

Can you imagine people posing in front of the hospital they got care in?

What does this have to do with healthcare PR and marketing? Hospital and health plans are falling all over themselves to tell us how patient-oriented they are, how they want to hear from us, how they are committed to the whole patient and community. They are, in some cases, doing a good job of communicating. And in some cases, they are really trying to deliver. But spend time getting care for yourself or a loved one and one becomes painfully aware of the shortcomings of the system – its insensitivity to individual need, its rapacious appetite for fees, the nonexistent customer service, the often sketchy connection to the best available treatments, and yes, the appalling hospital food.

PR and marketing can aspire, but must not outrun the reality of what you are promoting. The gap is too large, and it undercuts both the message and genuine attempts to provide truly better healthcare.

What’s that? A hospital cannot be run like Chez Panisse? It would cost too much, you say? Looked at a hospital bill lately?

Did an EHR miss Ebola in the case of Thomas Eric Duncan being released from a Texas hospital with Ebola-like symptoms after telling an ER nurse he had recently been in Africa? Beth Walsh, writing in CMIO, discusses a report of a panel of experts put together by Texas Health Resources, which ran a hospital that released Duncan without initially diagnosing or treating Ebola, which he later died from.

According to the report, the admitting nurse made a note of Duncan’s visit to Africa in the EHR, but her notes were not immediately visible to a physician who later examined Duncan. The report noted that processes in the emergency department “did not optimally address the early identification of Ebola or other emerging diseases during the first ED visit, nor did [the hospital] optimally utilize the full capability of the electronic health record.” Turns out that while travel history is accessible to everyone in the emergency department, to view the information, a clinician would have to look beyond the initial patient assessment screen.

Kudos to Texas Health Resources for organizing a credible panel of outside experts from prestigious academic centers and the Joint Commission to get to the bottom of what happened. From a healthcare PR perspective, Texas Health Resources has taken constructive, transparent steps to learn from the incident and help others understand how to avoid this kind of tragedy in the future.

So, did the EHR miss Ebola? The answer is both yes and no. A nurse entered a critical piece of patient history in the electronic record, but not where the physician could readily see it. Early on in the Ebola outbreak, the disease was not sufficiently on the radar screen of clinicians. In the end, an EHR cannot substitute for human wisdom.

The Star Tribune featured ilos Videos, our client, on September 7th:

Ilos Videos, a start-up in St. Paul, looks to build on early success

By Neal St. Anthony

Nick Stokman and Sean Higgins, co-founders of ilos Videos.

Nick Stokman and Sean Higgins are a couple of 24-year-old accounting graduates of the University of St. Thomas who concluded early that they didn’t want to be accountants.

Stokman, who won an academic accounting award for his prowess while a student, recalls a painful internship at Travelers in St. Paul. He was working on corporate tax returns.

“It’s a conservative insurance company and totally different from my personality,” said Stokman, who can be irreverent and off the wall. “And I had to learn this accounting software. And clicking on the ‘help’ thing to learn this or that was totally useless. Things that can be super simple to understand can be really complicated in text.

“And I’d go to my manager, and he said that the hardest part of bringing on new people was answering the same questions.”

Stokman had an idea for a company in 2012 that, after two years of development with client companies and collaborators, launched commercial operations in January as Ilos Videos.

Ilos makes software and provides support to a growing list of 30 companies in North America and the United Kingdom who want customized videos demonstrating routine tasks such as how to put a new record in or add a personal contact into Salesforce.com, how to change account information or pay bills, or how to use the software used by ResDiary on priority seating for customers in 3,000 restaurants.

Ilos employs 12 full- and part-time employees and will post revenue under $500,000 this year, Higgins said.

“We have 20,000 users, including some free users, and people use Ilos to create short videos of ‘frequently asked questions,’ ” he said. “We make software that enables clients to communicate the things they know to employees to vendors and users of their products.

“One of our customers is Atterro [Human Capital Group]. They use ilos software for bringing on new employees. Lots of employees. And each person needs to know about timecards, expense reports, how to file for time off.”

Stokman, also a software jockey, is a self-described ADHD kid, who also was dyslexic and couldn’t read until he was 12.

He also is a genial guy who can be obsessive about work. His greatest joy, he said, is helping people, including spending weeks with his physician dad on medical-volunteer missions when he was young. Stokman was a youth entrepreneur who earned college tuition working obsessively on his own lawn service, starting when he was in high school.

And he also spearheaded a $100,000 fundraiser for a skateboard park in his hometown of Crosby, Minn. That helped settle friction between kids who wanted a place to practice and authorities who didn’t want them on private property or in the street.

“Nick is brilliant and all over the walls, the ceiling, everywhere,” said Higgins, who earned an MBA and is the calm, plain-talking face of this outfit. “He’s come to me with entrepreneurial ideas over the years. I’ve shot some down. Nick has lots of ideas. Ilos was a good one. My goal is to harness the power of Nick.”

Higgins said when Stokman told him about his idea for Ilos, he headed to Google to look for companies doing the same thing.

“We saw a lot of gaps. We didn’t see one player doing specifically what we wanted to do. It’s not YouTube, and it’s not editing software. We thought we could develop a ‘lightweight video functionality’ without big production costs in a corporate studio. But software that could enable you to communicate tasks and processes faster than anything available.”

Ilos, a Greek word Stokman and Higgins interpret as “search” as a definition, was born in their apartments.

In recent years, they would rent short-term space at cooperative-workspace Coco in downtown to impress prospective partners and clients for meetings. Several months ago the company, with revenue starting to flow, leased unfinished space in a refurbished St. Paul Lowertown warehouse. The employees work from folding chairs and tables. Frisbees and Nerf balls often sail through the air.

“We don’t have a lot of overhead,” said Higgins, including minuscule salaries so far. “We’re reinvesting in the business, and we won’t break even until next year.”

The company has raised about $500,000 in equity and is owned largely by employees, individual “angel” investors who take stakes in promising upstarts, and the Norris Institute at the University of St. Thomas. Mike Moore, who runs the Norris Institute, which invests in young, innovative concerns said Norris has a stake of about $100,000 in ilos.

Moore said he found that ilos customers “saw this as away to cut training time and reduce expenses.

“It applies to any kind of organization,” Moore said. “We have faculty who use it for courses for students they know will have problems with certain parts of the curriculum. Rather than talking them through again and again … here’s the software.”