The Benefit’s Package Blog Carnival

I appreciate the submissions that I got for this week’s Benefit’s Package Blog Carnival.

Adam Fein of Drug Channels submitted a post that was near to my heart since it is a study that everyone has been talking about (in the pharmacy space). He wrote up a summary of the research that CVS Caremark published about choice of retail versus mail and what they were seeing. Like adherence, past behavior is a good indicator of future behavior. In this case, people who had used mail before, were more likely to use it again.

In Dave Kerrigan’s submission, he talks about the need to Percolate the Perks. He brings up a great point around how to sustain engagement. The reality of differentiating your benefits, keeping people aware of them, and getting people to use them is a real challenge. Some of the ideas he brings up are relevant across the spectrum of engaging consumers.

Building on engagement, one of the things that scares a lot of people is being misdiagnosed or given the wrong treatment (or getting surgery on the wrong body part). Evan Falchuk talks about this in his blog post on Third Place Health Care. The opportunity to get a 3^rd party opinion is one that I think lots of people would like to access. And, interestingly, Jennifer Benz also talks about this in her submission about Boosting 401k Participation. Her post talks about what’s happened from a tax perspective and stressing that with the consumer.

While I’m not sure of the relevance from a health benefits perspective, I did get an interesting submission from the Action For Better Healthcare blog on what Geisinger is doing around making facilities more efficient. This plays into a lot of the green architecture efforts that are ongoing (see a blog and book from a classmate of mine from architecture school). But, I found another post on the blog more interesting –an interview they posted with Karl Rowe which is interesting given the Kaiser research that many people think healthcare reform is already repealed.

Next up, I thought the Free Range Communication blog does a great job of breaking out highlights from the recent SHRM report. A lot of topics of focus to the HR community are very health centric, and a lot of the trends around aging, increased use of caregivers, more people with chronic conditions, etc. are all very relevant. For those of you looking for similar data around pharmacy benefits, I just pulled out some data from another report from PBMI here.

Dr. Liu wrote on Why Consumer Driven Healthcare Will Fail and also had a piece on the recent Consumer Reports story about What Doctors Wish Their Patients Knew. He draws some parallels around CDHC and 401k plans which I think is very relevant.

Another post from this past week that I liked was Dr. Val’s write-up on Tabloid Medicine. Given the fiasco around vaccines and the false research, this should be a hot topic.

I also liked an AMA story about Secret Shoppers and Susannah Fox’s video and writing on Healthcare Out Loud. A few other things from this week were a brief summary of some of the work Sanofi-Aventis is doing in social media, a paper on The Connected Patient by Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, and some research on storytelling and hypertension.