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Trilogy Tidings July 2012 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ |
My focus this month is on several important trends that are likely to affect suppliers of medical products - plus one innocuous little commercial.
Happy Summer!
Regards, Joe
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A New Source of Healthcare Cost & Utilization Data
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The recently formed Health Care Cost Institute (HCCI) just released its first cost and utilization report. The 2010 HCCI Health Care Cost and Utilization Report is the first report of its kind to track changes in expenditures and utilization of healthcare services by those younger than 65 covered by employer-sponsored private health insurance. The report covers the years 2009 and 2010. Claims data were contributed by Aetna, Humana, Kaiser Permanente and UnitedHealthcare.
The report is worth a look. As additional insurers agree to cooperate, HCCI could become an important complementary source to US government (Medicare and Medicaid) data. |
Drug/Device Combination Products
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There's little question that this class of medical products is important and is likely to remain so. A recent article authored by Dr. Gary Rothbard for PharmaLive does a nice job as a primer on the subject and a compiler of interesting product examples, some of which you may not be aware of.
Rothbard addresses several benefits and rationales for the existence of these products: regulatory, business, scientific and therapeutic. |
Physician Responses to Healthcare Reform
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I think all of us in the US should care about how our docs will react to "healthcare reform", whatever that turns out to mean. Granted, we as individual patients and product suppliers can do little to influence this apparently uncontrolled and sometimes scary evolution. But it's certainly a good idea to monitor how clinicians respond over time.
One extreme view (or maybe not) of one physician was revealed in a published interview with Dr. Jane Orient, the Executive Director at the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons. In case you haven't noticed, physicians are people too, so they react when their practices, incomes and work lives are threatened. Orient paints an interesting and rather disturbing picture. |
Power of First Impressions
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So, we agree that physicians, nurses, lab workers and such are also people. And people experience first impressions of things. And those impressions are not easily reversed. And they just might influence intent to purchase and use. Now we're talking about product design, some would say industrial design.
I've always been a fan, ever since I got to observe in the 1980s what industrial designers can contribute to the commercial success of a new medical product. And I have since noted how many medical products are poorly designed, or more accurately not designed with the user's first impressions in mind.
A published interview with Stuart Karten, an industrial designer and juror of the Medical Design Excellence Awards, is a worthy and quick read. Of course he wants you to hire his firm. But he makes some interesting points about first impressions and the "first moment of truth". |
Now Let's Talk About Me
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It occurs to me that you may not know enough about what we do and how we do it. I realized that recently while preparing for a capabilities presentation focused on market research. (I confess that I do a lousy job of marketing our consulting practice, since most of our "marketing" is word-of-mouth.) So a colleague (Ed Weiner) and I put together a Trilogy Associates capabilities overview for a prospective client.
A generalized version of that presentation can be found here. Have a look. Then hire us! |