A Little Levity on the Eve of Surgery
For the past 13 years or so I’ve been touting the patient benefits of various medical technologies and techniques. Well tomorrow I’ll be the beneficiary of those benefits as I undergo surgery.
As I sit here trying to wrap up all of the loose ends before I am out of commission for the rest of the week, I came across a list of funny headlines that I’ve compiled while monitoring the news. Thought I would share them with you. Please feel free to share your own.
New Year, New Face
As someone who works to generate attention and interest for other people’s organizations and products, sometimes I neglect to properly position and promote my own business. While I launched my new website last year, I never took the time to have a professional photo taken of myself. And since I am a one-woman shop for the most part, I realized that it was important to offer up a face with the name.
Taking a look at my outdated headshot on LinkedIn (something that was cropped out of a family event photo five years ago), I turned to a professional for the job and hired Lucy Cobos, a veteran photographer known for her portraits of Boston’s healthcare leaders.
I typically hate photos of myself, but Lucy used her artistic magic to capture the face that I was hoping to convey for my business. You can see the resulting photos on the Bio page of my website and in my LinkedIn profile.
And many thanks to Phoebe Ramler of Phoebe’s Faces for her make-up artistry. I don’t tend to wear much make-up in my everyday life – Phoebe did a great job of enhancing me for the photo shoot while keeping me real!
A Perspective on Healthcare Communications in the New Economy
Over the past few months, I’ve been hearing more and more medical device manufacturers talk about how they are adapting their product development, marketing and sales efforts to meet the needs of increasingly cost-conscious healthcare providers. Read more
The Massachusetts Medical Device Industry Has a New Face
MassMEDIC, the largest regional medical device association in the United States, launched its new website this week: www.massmedic.com. I had the pleasure of working with MassMEDIC president Tom Sommer and web designer/developer Scott Poulin on the site’s content and design. It features background on the organization, member benefits, upcoming events and resources including a job bank, suppliers directory and member reports.
Insights from the FDA UDI Conference
I attended the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) UDI Conference last week in Cambridge, Mass. on behalf of my client GHX, where representatives from across the healthcare industry (healthcare providers, device manufacturers, regulators, trade associations, distributors, GPOs, etc.) came together to discuss how they would comply with the FDA’s pending UDI rule and what benefits stakeholders could derive from the use of unique device identifiers (both in the operational and clinical realms).
The industry has been anxiously awaiting the proposed rule, which, according to Jay Crowley, Sr. Adviser for Patient Safety with the FDA Center for Devices and Radiological Health, could be out before the end of this year. During his keynote presentation, Crowley noted that the agency is still anticipating that the final rule will be issued in the fall of 2012.
During the conference presentations, providers and suppliers expressed their unique challenges around UDI implementation and there was some finger pointing/accusations on why healthcare is in such a bad state in the first place when it comes to device tracking – one provider even suggested that hospitals should charge device manufacturers for the time/labor required to manage product recalls (you can imagine the eye rolling among the suppliers in the audience).
But despite the differing opinions, just about everyone in attendance agreed that an industry-wide solution to device tracking requires providers and suppliers to put aside their differences and work together. Everyone stands to benefit from the FDA’s UDI system but only if everyone puts it to use. As one presenter stated – “a standard isn’t a standard unless everybody is using it.”