City of Paris

The dawn of the new millennium doesn’t feel like that long ago. Remember the days when the Y2K bug was our primary concern? A look at the lists of “10 best” and “10 most” of the year—or the decade—is telling of our times and the choices we face.

On energy, Financial Times posed two lists of questions to consider:
Top 10 energy questions for 2010 - Hydrocarbons edition
Top 10 questions for 2010 - Climate change and clean tech edition

For a quick recap, here is a comic strip to take us through the history of finance of the past decade.

Where do we begin on healthcare? For those of us who are still undecided, here are 10 reasons to support the healthcare reform bills.

Or vote on the healthcare deal of the year.

Everyone is writing about social media. Here are two that may interest healthcare marketers. Top 50 Twitter Topics of the Year and the Top Viral Videos of 2009.

And finally, lest we forget: Top 10 Worst Humanitarian Crises.

Earlier this year, March 4 to be exact, I opened a Twitter account, out of curiosity about what it could do and wanting to learn more about social media. I had a few friends who were on Twitter and I started off having one-on-one exchanges with them. Then I began tweeting to let people know when I posted a new blog. Slowly but surely, Twitter has become one of the first sites I visit in the morning when I sit down at my desk. I made a number of new friends, and many of the people I follow have become one of my primary sources of information about healthcare, marketing, communications, ethics, business policy—all the things that I need to stay relevant in my work. I am not a “high profile” user with hundreds and thousands of followers, but perhaps next year I’ll aspire to becoming a Brand or Maven or Mensch as described by Guy Kawasaki.

What I really like about Twitter is the openness. Unlike on LinkedIn or Facebook, for example, most Twitter users welcome new followers. In most cases you can start following someone right away. Out of curiosity, the people you choose to follow may follow you back, and vice versa. This is how I’ve made most of my “friends” on Twitter. Even though I’ve never met many of them, I feel like many of them are friends after seeing each person’s picture next to his or her tweet almost every day. By contrast, LinkedIn is most useful to me when I want to look up someone I know and reconnect with them. Ditto Facebook.

The catch is that some people who sign up as followers have ulterior motives. Here is what I mean. Many people consider followers on Twitter more or less as assets. The more followers you have, the broader your reach. At the very minimum I suppose it confers bragging rights. Taking this to the extreme, you can “buy” followers. (I have lost track of the link to information about how this can be done.) Another strategy sometimes used is to sign up as a follower, ostensibly, to as many different Twitter users as possible, knowing that some will reciprocate. I discovered how this worked by accident, when I observed that, at times, when a follower signs up and I don’t reciprocate, I get dropped in short order.

If you’re not already on Twitter and want to give it a try in 2010, I highly recommend it! And here are a few interesting people to consider following. Most of them are in the healthcare space.

http://twitter.com/ChristianeTrue
http://twitter.com/EdBennett
http://twitter.com/rilescat
http://twitter.com/Phrmageddon2012
http://twitter.com/kevinmd
http://twitter.com/FierceBiotech
http://twitter.com/scotthensley
http://twitter.com/pharmalot
http://twitter.com/ThisIsSethsBlog
http://twitter.com/GuyKawasaki
http://twitter.com/cityofparis (that’s me!)

While retailers lament that holiday sales are still in the doldrums, retail analysts note that, this year, the economy is not the only reason for consumers to hold back. Rather, it is a lack of innovation. Other than Zhu Zhu hamsters, there are few must haves for this holiday season. The analysts note that “Cash for Clunkers” recruited consumers for auto dealers in the midst of the recession. Likewise, iPhone sales continued strong. Meantime, the Financial Times reports on the rise and fall of MySpace, and though the settings are different (notably MySpace went through a huge culture shock with the acquisition by News Corp.), the lessons for marketers are very similar.

One, tough times are not a good reason to stop innovating, which inevitably involves taking risks and, just as important, making innovation the top priority. Typically this means putting innovation ahead of short-term profits. Zhu Zhu pets come from Cepia, a relative newcomer in the toy business. The MySpace story is more complex, but the first parallel is the focus on making numbers (revenue promised to Wall Street pushing managers to make decisions that compromise customer experience). I’ve watched and experienced this irony many times in my career. Anytime profit is put ahead of customers, customers go away and so does profit.

Two, take your eye off the ball and you can expect competition to take it away from you. In many ways, it is hard to expect innovation at a time when companies, especially the smaller and medium-sized businesses, are struggling to stay afloat. And in the case of MySpace, chairman Rupert Murdoch had a huge distraction—the all-consuming acquisition of Dow Jones, the company that owns The Wall Street Journal.

This all goes to say that in our business of marketing and communications, good ideas come first, budget cuts and poor economy notwithstanding. And if we believe that a smaller budget means doing less, which means thinking less, we are conceding to competition who are willing to think harder and work smarter to get more accomplished and make a bigger impact with less.

Five-Year Progress Report from Traditional Chinese Medicine AIDS Treatment Program

Encouraging results from a pilot program initiated in 2004 showed that 5,972 HIV/AIDS patients in 17 provinces are currently receiving free traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) treatment. The nationwide program is managed by the State Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine (SATCM) with 160 million RMB in funding, to date, from the central government. About 25 percent of close to 6,000 patients have received uninterrupted treatment for 48 months. The results showed that TCM is efficacious for treating fever, coughing, weakness, diarrhea, shortness of breath, skin diseases, digestive diseases and other clinical symptoms, in improving and stabilizing immune function, elevating the patient’s quality of life and reducing adverse reactions to medications. The SATCM has established the AIDS Prevention and Treatment Center at the Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine and is building regional and local infrastructure to evaluate treatment and management models. The report states that clinical trials in Tanzania initiated in 1987 have demonstrated the efficacy of dozens of TCM treatments for AIDS and identified an additional 20 TCM entities for additional research.

Heated Debates About Healthcare Cost Shifting Continue

When the opinion paper “Reform of drug and healthcare service pricing model and system” from the Ministry of Health and related government bureaus was released on November 23, one of the key premises—reducing drug costs while elevating service costs—garnered immediate, heated comments. Some typical questions raised were: Is it possible to fix the old system of subsidizing services with high drug costs? Can the doctor’s value be fully recognized? Will this reduce overall healthcare costs? Will this improve the quality of service? Here is a snapshot of the opinions voiced.

• Service fee increases do not compensate for lowered drug costs. One hospital that reduced the cost of 1,054 drugs (Western) and 562 TCM items and reduced the cost burden on patients experienced a huge increase in outpatient volume (at the expense of nearby hospitals that have not reduced prices). But the corresponding 4 percent increase in service fees is inadequate for covering the lost drug revenue, and the hospital administrator does not believe current price levels are sustainable.
• Higher service fees elevate expectations of better quality care. The hospital administrator of a major tertiary care center believes that the shift could break the vicious cycle of physicians seeking compensation by prescribing more expensive drugs. Another hospital administrator commented that improving physician compensation may encourage more young people to become doctors. But the bottom line is that higher service fees must be reflected in improved care.
• Government subsidy may be the way. The recurring theme seems to be that the rise in service fees cannot happen fast enough or substantially enough to cover the lost drug revenue. And the government needs to step in to fill the gap.