Identifying unproven cancer treatments on the health web: addressing accuracy, generalizability and scalability.

Building machine learning models that identify unproven cancer treatments on the Health Web is a promising approach for dealing with the dissemination of false and dangerous information to vulnerable health consumers. Aside from the obvious requirement of accuracy, two issues are of practical importance in deploying these models in real world applications. (a) Generalizability: The models must generalize to all treatments (not just the ones used in the training of the models). (b) Scalability: The models can be applied efficiently to billions of documents on the Health Web. First, we provide methods and related empirical data demonstrating strong accuracy and generalizability. Second, by combining the MapReduce distributed architecture and high dimensionality compression via Markov Boundary feature selection, we show how to scale the application of the models to WWW-scale corpora. The present work provides evidence that (a) a very small subset of unproven cancer treatments is sufficient to build a model to identify unproven treatments on the web; (b) unproven treatments use distinct language to market their claims and this language is learnable; (c) through distributed parallelization and state of the art feature selection, it is possible to prepare the corpora and build and apply models with large scalability.

Advanced marketing: how to protect and advance your practice.

Radiology practices in the United States are facing mounting competitive challenges in many metropolitan areas. This competition is multifaceted and includes other traditional diagnostic imagers. However, the most severe pressures are from new entrants, such as primary and specialty physicians outside of radiology. The business science of marketing provides a set of solutions to help you fight back against this onslaught. In particular, advanced marketing techniques offer compelling strengths for raising awareness of the unique nature of our specialty among both the lay population and primary referrers. Applications of advanced marketing can be used to simultaneously hold and expand your turf. Relying on smarts rather than dollars, they also help overcome the fears that many radiology practices have about the high costs of traditional broadcasting.

Criação e agregação de valor no setor de produtos médico-hospitalares no Brasil: uma análise do segmento de implantes cardíacos / Value criation and addition in the brazilian medical device sector: an analysis of the cardíac implant segment

Este artigo apresenta os resultados de uma pesquisa que buscou identificar as atividades realizadas por empresas do setor de equipamentos médico-hospitalares no Brasil para agregar valor a suas ofertas ao mercado, na opinião de seus executivos, e compará-las com a percepção dos médicos geradores da demanda por esses produtos. A agregação de valor é uma prática já difundida na comercialização de produtos de consumo de massa, porém são conhecidas as dificuldades para alcançar em produtos em que a geração de demanda envolve mais de um público-alvo. Este é o caso dos produtos médico-hospitalares e, mais especificamente, dos equipamentos usados em implantes cardíacos. A pesquisa que suportou as conclusões deste estudo desenvolveu-se em duas etapas, uma exploratória, que permitiu conhecer os esforços de marketing empreendidos pelas empresas, e outra descritiva, a partir de um levantamento de campo envolvendo 291 médicos geradores de demanda. Os resultados mostram quais ações desenvolvidas pelas empresas são, de fato, valorizadas positivamente pelos médicos.

An opportunity for HMOs to use marketing to increase enrollee satisfaction.

PURPOSE: To identify the combination of marketing components (i.e., service, price, access, and promotion) of commercial health maintenance organizations (HMOs) that are related to overall enrollee satisfaction. The researchers focus on factors that commercial HMOs control directly--specifically, health care organization and financing. DESIGN: Descriptive (mail order). METHODOLOGY: This study uses national data provided by a major health benefits consulting firm, which collected data from a 1997 calendar year mail survey of HMO administrators. The administrators responded to an extensive survey, which tapped selected HMO marketing-mix components and the percentage of surveyed members who indicated satisfaction with their HMOs. To test hypotheses, researchers treated marketing-mix components as independent variables and enrollee satisfaction as the dependent variable. PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: This study found statistically significant relationships between overall satisfaction and HMO providers' quality; access, particularly to specialists and out-of-network providers; waiting times for physician services; customer service; and disease prevention/health promotion programs. The researchers did not find significant relationships between overall satisfaction and accreditation by the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA), the presence of physician gatekeepers, numbers of providers, or financial indicators. The relationship between overall satisfaction and utilization was mixed. This study's findings are largely consistent with the literature, consumer- and professional-group position papers, and the President's Advisory Commission on Consumer Protection and Quality in the Health Care Industry. CONCLUSIONS: HMOs can use marketing as a way to address problems and pursue opportunities identified by enrollees. As these findings demonstrate, certain features of HMO design are more appealing to patients. By focusing on these preferences, HMOs can adopt a responsive market orientation that gives rise to more effective marketing mixes and hence improves enrollee satisfaction. With improved satisfaction, enrollees generate less need for government intervention through regulation or legislation.

The selling of health care services: are all sales jobs the same?

The selling activities of 272 salespeople were identified by polling 122 health care services organizations nationwide. A taxonomy of sales jobs was developed to classify the range of selling tasks within health care. The taxonomy is presented, discussed, and compared with a similar industrial one. Managerial implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Internal marketing of the dental practice.

A sound internal marketing or patient relations program is the foundation for a successful dental practice. In this article the author defines internal marketing as it applies to today's society and gives guidelines for establishing a program in the dental office that will relate to patients and meet their individual needs.

Developing and operationalizing a product/service classification system for health care providers.

A variety of classification systems have been presented since 1923. They have been directed toward classifying consumer goods, industrial goods, services, and ideas. The author assimilates several systems into a single system and describes two tools for operationalizing it. Examples and figures are presented and discussed.