Three hospitals will soon let 30,000 patients read the notes their doctors write about them and the state of their health during an exam. The idea makes some docs uncomfortable; they’re worried about how patients will react to seeing blunt observations like “morbidly obese” in black and white.
Another healthcare provider is testing avatars to prod patients who don’t follow doctors’ orders – combining Internet-connected, at-home diagnostics with an automated rules engine so that the avatar knows whether to nag about laying off the salt shaker, or ask if the patient took her pills.
Pushing the limits of Web-enabled customer relationships? That’s the whole point. IT teams over the past year have spent a lot of their time looking inward, focusing on cost cutting and infrastructure improvements, which tend to take a back seat in high-growth times.
But the best also keep improving their customer experience no matter the economy, and increasingly that means delivering a better Web experience, because the Web’s where people want to do business.
That’s why we looked at three industries that every one of us touches – healthcare, banking, and government – to find examples of organizations testing the power of the Web to connect with customers. The technologies themselves aren’t always cutting-edge, but their application is focused on specific problems or goals or new products – and, ultimately, on helping customers remain happy customers.
— By Marianne Kolbasuk McGee, Andrew Conry-Murray, and John Foley, with J. Nicholas Hoover
Until I can legally print money at home, or scan my money in for a deposit, then I need one of those banks.
Either that or we alter our monetary system to be 100% electronic, but that's not practical or even possible for a very long time to come due to the digital divide in the US as well as the world.
I also think the old adage of "out of sight, out of mind" has a lot to do with it, banks need to be seen so you know where to put your money, take out a car loan, get a mortgage, or any other number of things.
I know I will never go back to an online company for a mortgage ever again, I spent 8 months in hell trying to buy a home several years ago after going through an online portal for a mortgage. After 7.5 months of that hell I gave up and walked into a branch of a bank, and 2 weeks later was signing the final paperwork on my home.
In terms of the original post, that first paragraphs bothers me when it mentions a concern of the doctors with a patient not being able to handle seeing something like "morbidly obese" in the notes. I would question why that doctor wouldn't have told the patient they were morbidly obese in the first place.
Medical records are long overdue to be made electronically so that they can be accessed by multiple hospitals, doctors, and the patients themselves.
While I am 100% for the digitizing of our medical records, it also needs to be done with caution in order to assure longevity, cross compatibility by making sure that it's not stored in a proprietary format. Yet it also needs to be secure to make sure that no un-authorized access to a patients records occurs, while also allow for the ability of generating a report for the patient about who has accessed their records, when they accessed their records, and under what authority they accessed their records.
Good point, Lawrence. One thing that comes to mind is the ongoing risk of banking online from home -- a risk that seems to put the onus on the customer. Until there's a universally solid way to bank from home, there will always be a place for brick-and-mortal banks.
With all the advantages of electronic banking, why is all the construction in my neighborhood for bank branches? What is there a bank in every supermarket? In fact, the banks are converting former fast food restaurants to branches. Why do half the doors on a Manhattan street open into a bank?
Frankly, with all my opinions, I can not find one that fits this situation
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Today (November 3, 2009), VMware, Cisco, and EMC announced an alliance called VCE. The coalition packages up infrastructure based primarily on VMware Inc. (NYSE: VMW) software (vSphere); Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) compute and network infrastructure (UCS and Nexus switches); and EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC) storage.
Time was that marketing was about the Four Ps: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. Back when I received my certification as a marketing professional, I was schooled in each of the Four Ps. But somewhere along the way, we lost three of the Ps and were left just with promotion, or as we usually refer to it, messaging.
Do employees at your company use avatars in the work environment? And if they do, does the company have any way of controlling how they’re being used, or policies that describe standards of avatar conduct and appearance?
Daylight savings, spring cleaning, getting your oil changed, and replacing smoke detector batteries -- all have something in common; they all are completed on a schedule. So it’s about time those of us brandishing iPhones, BlackBerrys, and other PDAs like they are body parts start to embrace some scheduling that can protect our identity and build a more secure Internet environment.
Smarter Collaboration: How to Thrive in a Challenging Business Environment Market conditions are changing faster than ever, and organizations need to improve their agility and adaptability in order to provide better service and improve processes. The ability to work with customers, business partners, and employees as effectively as possible - while at the same time holding down costs - is a key to success. READ THIS eBOOK
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As enterprises leap into the Web 2.0 world of blogging, commenting, and social networking, just 'being there' won't deliver ROI. You may want a 'Web Evangelist' to systematically harvest the feedback in order to polish your product or service.
The big news at the Web 2.0 Summit was that Twitter partnered with Google and Bing, enabling the search engines to show Tweets in search results. This couldn't possibly be less interesting.
Good news! The cost of Internet infrastructure, services, and access devices has been plummeting at an accelerating rate over the last 10 years and will approach a point in the next 20 years where these technologies become so fantastically cheap that ubiquitous, low-cost, high-speed networks, storage, and access devices will effectively eliminate the digital divide for most of the world's population.
The city of San Francisco is on the leading edge of using the Internet to provide government transparency. It is providing WiFi for its have-nots, and its DataSF.org initiative is putting the city's valuable data back in the hands of its citizens, with innovative results.
In the final episode of this series about the death of Internet anonymity, Saunders describes how the Internet of the future will start to attain a level of intelligence that requires no human intervention. Scary.
Net neutrality is pitting fuddy-duddy telco types against the hipster-doofus Web developer brigade. What are telcos going to do with all the DPI and policy gear they've been so busy deploying over the past year? And whose side should Internet users be on?
Google's 'It Girl' talks about using personalized search to make sense of the mass of information on the Web – and how sometimes Google can appear to be semantically smarter than it really is.
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