Don't Hold Your Breath - for Some Companies to Deliver.

By I.J. Hudson

“Do what you say you’ll do.” That’s part of my mantra on how people should conduct themselves personally and in business.

I’ve had reason to “do business” with a number of firms related to the healthcare industry and wanted to share some things I see as issues, and at least one instance of someone, as my friend Jeremy Epstein would say, “being remarkable.”

Here’s the litany:

   

    The maker of a specialized device;

    The company that sold the device; and

    Two suppliers of a healthcare product.

1)      An after hours call to request help in receiving a replacement “specialized device” led to a local referral of two companies who could supply intermediate help until the original company in could be reached the next day.  More on the intermediate help in 3.

2)      The company that sold the device had four different answers to the same question; the answer dependent upon which person answered it.  When can we receive a replacement unit?  “We will ship it out tomorrow (Friday).”  The distance is 2200 miles.  I’m thinking they will overnight the device, but as Saturday faded into Sunday into Monday morning - nothing received.  It’s Monday evening, and they’ve promised it on Friday…again. 

I guess it’s time to unveil what I’m talking about – oxygen for an 85-year old veteran of World War II.  He has a portable oxygen “concentrator” unit that died when our home took six hits from PEPCO.  It was plugged in to charge.  It reset once and worked for a few hours – then died. That’s what started a series of calls to find a replacement (from manufacturer or company that sold it) and to find backup oxygen (the healthcare product) until it arrived.

 3)   The large local company we contacted that supplies home oxygen could accommodate us: payment up front (no interest in receiving payment through his award from DOL), and you can come pick it up, if you’re interested).  To these folks, it was just a business.  “We’re big. You need us more than we need you” was the message made clear with every contact.

The smaller company recommended by the equipment maker was Spectrum Medical, Inc. in Silver Spring, MD, who responded with, “What can we do to help?”  Their help began within a couple of hours, and this was at night.  Over several days, they did what they said they would and went out of their way to be helpful and remarkable – especially a guy named “Rob.” They were remarkable enough to inspire me to write this posting.

I don’t mention the names of the other characters in this short story because they aren’t remarkable.  Unfortunately, if you live in the Washington, DC area, you will probably deal with them, and I suspect they are the norm in their respective areas. Too bad. The norm isn’t good enough when you’re talking about oxygen.

As my father-in-law says, “it’s not like you can hold your breath.”

Information Pyramid

By I.J. Hudson

I apologize for the title. I simply couldn’t come up with anything else.  

This is simply a personal story that illustrates how technology has shifted where we go first for information  -  nothing more; nothing less.

I’ve written before that my 85 year-old father-in-law picked up an iPad2 and is having a ball.  He’s looking at old things in a new way.  He’s searching and finding information about World War II that he talked about before.  But now he is finding a lot of detail about it on the Internet, and even providing detail that is NOT on the Internet (more later).   He’s also doing something that  young people started doing a long time ago – looking at his mobile phone for the TIME – not at his watch.

Some of you may know that I was a reporter for more than three decades, and covered forward-looking technology for several years at a TV station in Washington, DC.  It was fun to go to work every day, learn a lot of new stuff, write about it and go home with a smile on my face.  And while I embrace new technology, I do so only when it really makes sense for ME.  

Occasionally, I have a moment when things that have been “out there” are brought into sharp focus.  Here’s my case in point:

Situation:  my daughter is driving her kids to my place to see their great-grandfather and calls at 8AM to say traffic isn’t moving, and could I go online to find out what’s going on.  Sure!  Where did I start?  Google.  Wrong choice!   

 Slap me around a bit ---- I quickly put myself in the shoes of someone caught in that traffic jam – Twitter screamed at me.  I searched Twitter for I-77 and found several tweets related to the crash causing the traffic jam.  I checked all of the folks tweeting and found a TV station tweeting  the information, and went to their homepage to get more detail.  Then I relayed that to my daughter.

All of this was a quick reminder about the pyramid of information that starts with the individual – either tweeting or re-tweeting information, then moving down the pyramid to a source among the tweeters that is likely to have more information.  Individual tweeters, in  their cars,  know that something has happened, can describe where and what it looks like.  But an established news organization has the resources and the credentials to find out and share more detail from the troopers/Public Information Officer on the scene. 

IMHO Twitter is a great resource for basic information; context is a different layer of the onion.  For basic information ----- I now start with Twitter.