Be an Informed Patient this flu season

Hopefully, you’re not dealing with the flu, but if you are, authors Sara L. Merwin, MPH, and Karen A. Friedman, MD, have some handy tips in their patient-centric book The Informed Patient: A Complete Guide to a Hospital Stay.

As we’re all seeing and hearing on the news at the moment, we’re smack dab in the middle of the worst flu season for some time. Bear in mind that the late fall and winter months usually have the longest wait times for a bed. 

Doc Martyn’s Sage Marketing: Reading is Power

Reading is power, because knowledge gives us the tools to think more widely about the things that confront us on a daily basis. In the aftermath of the presidential election many thousands of think pieces, blogs, articles, and much more have been written to rejoice, despair, cajole, criticize, and much else. Many of us read those pieces with minds perhaps already formed, or perhaps not completely open to new ideas. Such an approach is understandable; we seek out information that fits how we view the world or how we wish to view it. We don’t always seek out knowledge that pushes the boundaries of what we already perceive.

One of my jobs as marketing director is to introduce people to new information. Essentially, every time my team and I start marketing a new book we must seek a way to get someone to engage with content that they might not know about, be immediately interested in, or consider within the scope of their desire to know. Every book has a core audience, of course. Each author has written his or her book with that audience in mind. But there are often also audiences that do not immediately seem applicable. It is our job as marketers to find those people so that we can introduce them to the content and, we hope, expand their view of the world.