I have been working in the Anti-Money Laundering (AML) for awhile. Compared to healthcare or the more general Customer Relationship Management (CRM) space, the AML and Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) is really the “shady” side of the customer–or at least it assumes that some customer are a shady and tries to find them or prevent their actions. Some estimates suggest that the aggregate impact of BSA/AML (and Fraud) regulations is only 10-20% of the total amount of dollar flow in the world so we know that while regulators and prosecutors do catch some of the bad guys alot of dollars remain on the table. ...

A recent HBR article (October 2013) mentioned that P&G and other companies are rethinking how they organize themselves. The basic idea is that instead of having fixed organizations, companies should organize themselves like consultancies–everything is a project and you assemble/disassemble teams as needed to solve problems. There will be some ongoing operations that do require “flat” jobs–jobs that more repetitive but still require knowledge workers? The article begs the question of whether organizing into projects and flexible staff (like consultancies) is a good thing for companies that are heavily knowledge worker based. Part of the proof that knowledge work is becoming more dominant is by looking at the decreasing COGS and increasing SG&A lines on financial statements. COGS indicates decreasing amounts of “blue-collar” work over time while SG&A is a good proxy for white-collar, knowledge worker type jobs. ...

I have covered this topic before but I came across an article that stimulated by thinking again. It has been said that ACOs are really the new HMOs. HMOs in the 1990 were an experiment to put ‘risk and reward in the same bucket.” Much like integrated capitation, the idea is to let those that save money, while still delivering great quality care, benefit from their innovations. This was the thinking behind the Affordable Care Act, which seeks to re-align risk and reward. It also, possibly unfortunately, makes Provider power even more concentrated. Maybe that’s good, maybe that’s bad. ...

Does ranking information, who likes what, top-10 rankings, produce “winner take all” situations? There is an old rule in strategy which is that there are no rules. While it is always nice to try and create underlying theories or rules of how the world works, science and mathematics are still fairly young to describe something this complex. Trying to apply rules like the concept presented in the title is probably some form of confirmatory bias. ...

I use google alerts to provide me a sense of flow around articles. One of the filters is around bigdata and healthcare. The flow around this topic has increased. I see many stories, $100m investment here, $20m investment there, and so on. That’s alot of dollars! Alot of it is government backed of course and put on hyperdrive with a recent McKinsey report on bigdata and potential healthcare savings. Breathlessly, drawing on my own bigdata and scientific background, I then ask, “well when should see the effects of these bigdata exercises?” The answer is not so clear. Just as I explained in my last post, there has not been a dramatic lack of analytics applied to healthcare. However, I do think to do more analytics because clearly there are many ideas and insights to draw on. ...