I received an automated call this morning from my health insurance carrier, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts. The robot announced that this was an important call about my health insurance benefits, then proceeded to have me confirm that it was me on the line. After that it gave a little spiel, telling me something about how my responses would help BCBS serve me better and stressing that my responses would be kept confidential.
Archive for August, 2008:
Wednesday 20 August 2008
Thanks to Pharmalot for drawing attention to an AVOS Life Sciences analysis of the future of big-cap pharma company revenue. The “replacement ratio” chart shows the extent to which each company is expected to replace dollars lost from declining products (mainly patent expirations) with revenue from products launched within the past five years. It’s analogous to the analyses of the birth rate relative to the replacement rate, which show countries like Italy and Japan heading for oblivion through population loss while the US manages to keep its head above water.
Wednesday 20 August 2008
Six Until Me hosts this week’s edition of Grand Rounds. Rural Doctoring will host next week.
Tuesday 19 August 2008
A dozen years ago or so when I was at the Boston Consulting Group, my colleague George Stalk asked us to imagine a world of infinite bandwidth and to dream about what new functionality and business models it would enable. We were still in the heart of the dial-up era, and video-conferencing was an expensive and ultimately unsatisfying experience, but desktop and mobile video were popular dreams. Infinite bandwidth is still far away (at least from my neighborhood) but we’ve at least reached the point where desktop video is generally usable.