Marketing Observations from the Hospital Bed
As some of you know, I suddenly ended up in the hospital a few weeks ago, dealing with a severe bout of pneumonia.
I’ll spare you most of the details, but it basically all started with the trip to the Howard County General Hospital ER http://www.hcgh.org/content/ on a Saturday night after having a severe reaction to something I ate. In the process, gastric fluids got into the lungs.
The digestive distress passed rather quickly, but an alert doctor observed that my vital signs were going downhill fast and determined that pneumonia was setting in quickly. He reversed my heading for discharge, and to my surprise, steered me toward the ICU unit.
Now we all are aware of the current national debate on health care reform. And I will not tread into that explosive political arena in this blog. (see P.S. at bottom of this blog for a most interesting update and link re: Howard County General being featured in a NPR story about health care reform)
But as I was in the ER, the ICU and then the regular ward (total stay was 7 days), I did make a number of marketing observations — both positive and negative, from the perspective of “the client.” (Robert Middleton, my marketing guru, www.actionplan.com, would have been proud of me.)