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What I learned week 16

This week was our final class as well as our final presenter, Beth Schively, Marketing Director of Scapa Healthcare and a graduate of WNE. I’ve heard Beth speak before at a pharmaceutical business luncheon, so I had a little knowledge about what she did and who she worked for. Scapa is a global strategic outsource partner of turn-key, skin friendly adhesive solutions for the healthcare industry. Scapa Healthcare partners with market leaders to design, develop, manufacture and commercialize innovative medical device products. One of Scapa’s competitive advantages is that they will not compete with their partners. Scapa does not sell to the end consumer, they work directly business to business. Their biggest competitor 3M does compete with its partners because they’ll bring their competitors adhesives to market, as well as their own. Both products could be side by side on the shelf. Scapa sees this as a plus for them because their customers feel like they aren’t being cheated. Beth talk
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What I learned week 15

This week, unfortunately Beth Schively was not able to attend Tuesdays session. Luckily though she rescheduled for next Thursday. We did have the presence though of talking with Carolyn Cary who works at Aetna. I know from the beginning I had several questions for Carolyn. For one, since I’m from Connecticut, I was curious if she could shed some light on why Aetna decided to leave Hartford. And for obvious reasons, New York city has more talent and technology. But New York will also provide Aetna with nearly $10 million worth of incentives in the forms of property and sales tax credits, among other benefits. In addition, I know other classmates of mine, as well as myself, had questions about the recent merge Aetna had with CVS. Just a week ago, CVS Caremark bought out Aetna, and Carolyn is excited for the change. Katelyn asked the question, “Will we see more mergers and acquisitions going forward, is this the new trend for companies?” and Carolyn said yes. Companies are looking for b
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What I learned week 14

This week we had speaker Justin Racine director of marketing and Ecommerce at Geriatric Medical Supply. Justin is a WNE alum with an interesting background. When attending school, Justin was a marketing major, pharmaceutical business didn’t exist yet. While in school Justin worked at a golf course part time to make some money in school. As graduation was getting closer and closer he knew he needed a marketing internship to graduate and working at a gold course wouldn’t cut it. Justin approached his boss and told him that he loved the job he was at but needed a marketing internship. Lucky for Justin, his boss also worked as the general manager of the supply division at a medical supply company and was able to get Justin a marketing internship that would pass for credit. Justin worked at the medical supply location for the summer and was given an objective to create a trifold brochure on the how-to and general information of the use of adult diapers. He did such a good job and everyone
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Questions for 11/28

Questions for 11/28 1.        What marketing tactics do you use to get your name out to the public? Do you heavily invest in marketing or is most of your marketing free such as word of mouth? 2.        Do you use Google Business or Yelp!? 3.        What percentage of your sales are cash vs. Medicare/insurance? Ethically speaking if a product is covered through their Medicare/ insurance program, do you always suggest that. Because obviously you want that cash transaction, but the customer would save money going through their insurance, and you will get paid, it might just take longer and obviously not cash. 4.        How much of your business is B2B vs. end consumer? 5.        What is your protocol with dealing with sales reps? 6.        What are some of the newest technological advances you’ve seen in the medical supply industry? 7.        What’s your most popularly sold category of equipment? Walkers, rollators, incontinence, ostomy… etc.?
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What I learned week 13

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What I learned week 13 The posted readings this week were about brand name pharmaceuticals. I read the industry report as well as did a little more research into the current landscape of the brand name pharmaceutical industry, as well as what the future holds.             I took my curiosity to the web and found a recent article, as recent as November 24 th discussing how the Trump administration is taking on drug prices. Trump wants to bring the hammer down on high drug prices, accusing pharmaceutical companies of “getting away with murder.” What’s in discussion is an idea to pass prescription drug rebates directly to seniors; like what Medicare reimburses hospitals for certain drugs, it’s the same concept. It’s no surprise that there are more and more generic drugs coming to market and competition is high for brand name pharmaceuticals. “ Last week, the agency proposed a more than 700-page rule targeted at out-of-pocket drug costs. Among the provisions, CMS sought feedback
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What I learned week 12

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What I learned week 12 Dr. Kahn gave us an introduction to the different government drug payments plans such as Medicare Parts B&D; Medicaid and the VA system. She also reinforced our knowledge of pharmacy benefit managers, and P&T committees, which we have discussed before with other speakers and learned upon in several readings. Dr. Kahn began the discussion talking about risk which I thought was very interesting. There are two types of risk, pure and speculative. Pure risk is a category of risk in which loss is the only possible outcome, such as a fire. Then there is speculative risk, which is a category of risk where there is a chance of gain as well as loss; such as gambling or starting a new business. Thus, pure risk is insurable to an extent whereas speculative risk is not insurable. You cannot buy insurance before you gamble to protect your money, it doesn’t work like that. Dr. Kahn started the conversation with these two definitions to further elaborate on the
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What I learned week 11

What I learned week 11 Unfortunately, I was not able to attend Tuesdays speaker for I had a work obligation and there were no assigned readings. I was however at Mina Hernandez’s discussion about the intersection of insurance and healthcare. Mina works at Hanover Insurance as an underwriter and developer of their health care section. There are four main categories in which they provide insurance to. There are medical devices, pharmaceuticals, digital health and contract research. This really opened my eyes because when I think of healthcare I mainly think of just drugs and medical devices, and that’s really all we’ve talked about so far, so it’s interesting to dive into these two unique aspects of the healthcare world. Especially digital health because we live in such a technology driven world that digital health is all around us. The broad scope of digital health includes categories such as mobile health i.e. cellphone fitness apps, health information technology, wearable devi
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