Here is the next step in the process improvement that hasn’t been nailed down yet. We need to use improved communication methods to improve patient care relative to medication usage.

In the US, policymakers are painfully aware of the fact that several unhealthy lifestyle conditions including diabetes and heart disease take up a disproportionate amount of health care spending.

Researchers at the CDC have gotten even more specific with a report that  4 drugs cause almost half of the emergency visits in the US.

According to researchers, nearly 100,000 hospitalizations every year are linked to adverse drug events such as allergic reactions and unintentional overdoses. Nearly half, or 48.1 percent, of those hospitalized were adults 80 years old or older.
“These data suggest that focusing safety initiatives on a few medicines that commonly cause serious, measurable harms can improve care for many older Americans,” said lead study author Dr. Daniel Budnitz, director of the CDC’s medication safety program. “Blood thinners and diabetes medicines often require blood testing and dosing changes, but these are critical medicines for older adults with certain medical conditions.”
“Of the thousands of medications available to older patients, a small group of blood thinners and diabetes medications caused a high proportion of emergency hospitalizations for adverse drug events among elderly Americans,” he added.

Read more: http://www.thestatecolumn.com/health/according-cdc-four-drugs-er-visits/#ixzz1f1y6QKXw

Physicians, Patients, and Insurance Companies have figured out how to improve the transaction process of filling prescriptions. We need to go the next step and use real time communications to improve the monitoring process.

One could imagine tying a regular automated daily phone call check in to any patient  taking certain medications who meets certain criteria. Outbound messaging combined with very simple DTMF gathering of information from the patient would certainly help to lower the number of ER visits.

Patrick Murphy, November 29th, 2011

It took some research but this little bit of news reflects significant changes in the way that doctors, pharmacies and health insurance companies communicate with each other.

Specifically, it requires pharmacies and insurance companies to interact using real time communication standards rather than the previous batch information standards.

I know this sounds like esoteric stuff. Yet, think about your typical interaction with a pharmacy over the past year as compared to a few years ago. I deal with a very large regional drug store chain so they may be ahead of the curve.

1. If you need a monthly prescription refilled many pharmacies proactively call you to tell you it is ready. At worst, one need just call a number on the bottle and request a time to pick it up.

2. Annual updates or anything requiring your physician’s involvement can most often happen over the phone within 24 or 48 hours.

3. For the most part there is little or no involvement that is required between the patient and the insurance company regarding prescription drug processing.

4. I am also told that Drug Enforcement Agency work in conjunction with Pharmacies has been greatly improved. Unfortunately, due to the increase in prescription drug abuse this technology enhancement has been vital.

There are certainly still outlier scenarios but the vast majority of pharmacy/physician/patient interactions have become faster, better, and cheaper for all parties involved thanks to real time communications.  The next post will suggest  powerful reasons these processes need to get even better.

According to Martin, I’ve been looking in the wrong place for UC/CEBP inspiration.  For background, one of the key opportunities in the future of multisided Telco related markets has been CEBP.

Geddes is typically right on target.  For the most part, the innovative activity is not coming from Telcos or telco inspired and dependent firms,today it is coming from companies that are focused on driving consumer or business transactions.

Several major examples have made news examples.
Amazon’s Kindle has come with wireless data connectivity as a free feature for years. Of course, the KindleFire is being positioned as a one stop commerce platform. Gaming stations have Unified Communications tools baked into their systems. In theory, Microsoft’s cloud initiatives dovetails nicely with their Skype acquisition. Given track records for Skype and Microsoft it is premature to make any real predictions about successful integration and collaboration efforts.

One can certainly see mobile content providers giving away or subsidizing the sale of low cost mobile entertainment, sms, communication devices to teenagers and young people globally under the assumption that all this demographics’ entertainment purchases will flow through their mobile entertainment, communication,commerce platforms.

Providing mobile phones to remote villages around the globe  to encourage the use of mobile commerce via sms is already happening. Similar to  credit card companies in the US over the last five decades, get the commerce platform in the hands of the consumers anyway possible.
It seems that the important innovations so far, are with consumer driven initiatives. Obviously some of these niches like gaming, app stores, and mobile payments are very big.

Are any of these innovations and the value they are creating being driven by Telcos? Not really, as Telcos continue to deal with commoditization issues the only differentiator over the last few years has been provided by Apple’s alignment with ATT.

So, from the Telco perspective, how do they bring more CEBP/UC style innovations directly to businesses?

The irony is this challenge is no longer a technology problem.  The tools, talents, platforms or apis required to integrate most communications functionality into practically any business process are understood and affordable. Many Telcos have platforms that allow for new services and apis to provide innovative solutions to clients.  Furthermore, the client use cases and return on investment calculations are already proven.

The challenge that has not been overcome by most Telcos and telco dependent companies is their view of the customer world looks horizontal.The “most” creative  Telcos and vendors may admit to several types of customers: consumers, business- class, and enterprise…alas small, medium and large is the same customer segmentation done by my local ice cream shop.

The challenge for Telcos and their vendors  is one of organizational structure and culture change on the revenue generating side of each company. Sales and marketing teams in CLECs and the vendors that support them have to get hyper focused on industry verticals…or at least CEBP vertical solutions.

Here are two examples of vertically specific opportunities that would allow Telcos to move beyond the selling of commodity voice and data services.

Healthcare is the vertical with the most money sloshing through it in the US today.
1.  The Federal government is providing $42,000 subsidies for physicians to adopt EMR technologies.  Amazingly, few of the EMRs that I have reviewed have any real communications functionality embedded in their platforms.  Here are two challenges to be solved by UC/CEBP.
First, making sure that patients don’t miss appointments has hard ROIs understood by everyone in healthcare. Secondly, the ability to securely transfer EMRs  within and between healthcare organizations and physicians has lots of lags and drags in the process.

K-12 and Higher Education continues to see above average growth while serving the most connected of our generations.
2. Outbound messaging and surveying applications have become  a standard  requirement for most schools and towns within the last six years.  Why couldn’t a CLEC provide school districts or municipalities  partner with Student Information Systems  or Municipal CRM platforms to provide outbound  student/citizen messaging applications as part of the voice and data packages.

Identifying the right types of  CEBP functionality  to add real value for customers is a matter of focus. Regardless, it does come down to a fundamental question.  Are the Telcos and all the Telco dependent firms really willing to think about customers with a bit more complexity than small, medium, or large. Then, are the best firms willing to align their sales and marketing organization to take ownership of this communications value proposition?

This Future of Voice events continue. There have been three events so far.  The FOV event is designed to be a personalized interactive executive seminar with seating limited. Here are links to Martin Geddes and Dean Bubley, the leaders of the Future of Voice event. I can’t think of  three more on target testimonials for these thought leaders.

Dean and Martin have consistently been ahead of the curve with market insight when it comes to

the telecom world. Their ability to describe what comes next puts them in a league of their own.

– Andy Abramson, CEO of Communicano, author VoIP Watch

When I run eComm conferences on emerging technology, Dean and Martin are two of the anchor

speakers. It’s hard to find people to beat their depth of knowledge on the future of voice.

– Lee Dryburgh, Founder of Emerging Communications Research & Events, LLC

I hired Dean and Martin as the ‘best in class’ industry experts to support Intel’s internal education

campaign on telecoms. The feedback from one attendee – “Intel’s best-ever webcast” – speaks for

itself.

– John Woodget, Global Director Telco Sector Worldwide, Intel Corporation

If you would like more information on the agenda for future  US events check out the website or contact me.

Sincerely

Patrick Murphy

Market Launch Group, Managing Partner

pmcape@gmail.com

skype: pmcape

508-364-3464

One of the  major elements at the recent Future of Voice event put on by Dean Bubley and  Martin Geddes is their focus on CEBP as providing ample potential for new revenue and profits to the broader telecom industry. From my perspective as an early evangelist, researcher, and practitioner in the emerging CEBP industry I was initially surprised by their enthusiasm but very encouraged by the end of the event. For background on the topic, here are links to a 2009 CEBP status report, my CEBP.biz blog, and the CEBP Linkedin group.

The premise of their argument is that voice services especially consumer voice services are for the first time being separated from telephony. Thus, telco operators no longer will have a monopoly on consumer to consumer voice services especially at the landline level. However, this does not mean that voice telephony needs to viewed as a dying offering if one understands the power of CEBP to change the enterprise.  It is recognized that CEBP has gone through a long adoption cycle and there needs to be a consolidation of the smaller players by the bigger players across the industry.

Ultimately, CEBP technology and vertical applications will be considered  defacto functionality in any CRM,  ERP or Telco enabled platforms  offered by the largest players globally.

On another front, the term of CEBP originally coined by Gartner is being repurposed by Cisco, SalesForce, Microsoft and others. Cisco is working on launching a technology suite they refer to as Collaboration enabled Business Transformation during their July user conference.

Being an early adopter and evangelist to a new industry can be lonely.  Thus, I encourage the new champions of CEBP to continue their good work.

Patrick Murphy

To get specific, it is the entrance of the mobile tablet devices into healthcare that  generate excitement and interest in our conversations. Apple’s IPAD has moved from exploration into real use cases across many healthcare processes.  This is all retail customer driven activity as Apple ‘s sales teams are not currently set up to sell devices into  enterprise verticals ( other than education.)  From my  research, Apple does not have a solid understanding of how their IPAD is being used within healthcare. They just know they are selling a lot of them to various healthcare providers. If they want to dominate the healthcare vertical, Apple just needs to show a bit of vertically focused sales and marketing effort.

Anecdotally, we have heard there are not yet any APP store solutions that are  becoming  the defacto downloads in the healthcare sector. Physicians are experimenting and working with developers to create their own solutions mostly related to capturing/sharing data using forms.

With RIM’s Playbook entering the market  and HP’s recent announcement of a coming mobile tablet device, the healthcare use cases will need to get spelled out in greater detail.  HP and RIM tend to sell along enterprise verticals so I expect they will be focused on gathering strong feature/benefit use cases very soon.  Enterprise sales are by definition solution sales so it will be interesting to see how HP and RIM align themselves with healthcare related applications that leverage their devices and most importantly their channels into healthcare decision makers.

The ability to share a  decent sized screen, type, surf, messaging, and collaboration on one portable, networked device are the features that  catch people’s attention with mobile tablets. Always on data and web connectivity is important, the phone is less important. In healthcare, security  and privacy are very important.  Thus, I don’t think the winner of the  healthcare centric mobile tablet device will be determined for another year or two.

At this point, Apple’s IPAD could dominate healthcare for years to come but their organizational sales and marketing culture does not typically do vertically focused enterprise sales.  HP and RIM could quickly catch up if they do a better job solution selling/marketing into the healthcare vertical.  I am unconvinced that a native app versus a web app will be an important issue for enterprise mobile tablet solutions. We will watch the race.

Later in June, we plan to post our clients’  healthcare related mobile  use cases along with any other great solutions we see at the Mobile Health Expo.

Patrick Murphy

Larger companies can ride a new market wave with greater resources but they still suffer failures due to lack of focus and new market savvy.  Smaller companies need to be very careful when it comes to entering new markets with their services and products. Opportunities are everywhere. Yet, “knowing what you don’t know” may be the simplest but least recognized sign of business wisdom.

With Market Launch Group we seek to simplify and limit the risks for our clients when they choose to go after new business opportunities.  Our approach of  combining “fractional” marketing, sales, and business development expertise in one firm is designed to provide our clients with a better, faster, cheaper way to go to market. We know it works. Let’s begin the conversation.

If that is the end goal, what are all the tasks and efforts needed to get to that point.