Pain: You Can Feel Mine if I Can Feel Yours

Last Saturday I attended the 2010 Denver SOBCON event.  SOB does not stand for bawl loudly; it stands for successful and outstanding bloggers (though I would have been equally intrigued by the idea of openly bawling all day).  There were several savvy speakers, each with a message or two about the importance of goal-setting, strategy-shaping, and the ins and outs of social media. I learned a lot.  Despite the brain damage I suffer every time I take a day or two away from the computer, 90% of the time, I learn stuff that is powerful.

One of the lessons that really resonated from this event, was taught by....Jonathan Fields who boiled marketing down to this: You cannot make money unless you're solving someone else's problems. To do this you have to live inside their head; listen, and learn your customers' (or potential customers') pain points.  And then find a way to resolve them.

Well yesterday I was too busy feeling my own pain to worry about yours. I'm talkin' prescription-strength pain. No, really.  Prescriptions are my pain point.  We have a family of 7 battling everything from ADD to acne, not to mention generalized anxiety disorder which may or may not have genetic roots, but is surely exacerbated by the stress of having ADD and acne, or for that matter, a mother who blogs about your ADD and acne.

Managing our many prescriptions in today's paranoid pharmaceutical landscape is enough to drive one to drink - as for that, no prescription is required- and yes, that is my official excuse.

Explain to me again the point of HIPAA? Isn't it something about protecting my privacy?  If so, it isn't working. We've had to switch doctors and insurance companies so many times, that by now half of all folks employed in the medical industry know every sordid detail of our bodily functions and dysfunctions?  Not to mention that, as a blogger, I've pretty much thrown privacy to the wind, anyway.

I'd love to get my hands on the wise guy who decreed that all controlled substances (re: ADD medications) must be handwritten and delivered in person to the pharmacy. For any Forrest Gumps (or cruelly clueless bureaucratic legislators) reading this, that means: call the doctor, wait through the "push the number" game, get put on hold, speak to a disinterested receptionist, drive across town to the office to pick up the prescription while praying they didn't close early for their two-hour lunch hour, take the paper to the pharmacy, wait in line (behind the stanchions-to ensure you don't impinge on the privacy of the customer ahead of you), sign the HIPAA papers (yes the same ones that you've signed 456 times), fill your cart with stuff you don't need while you're waiting 20 minutes for the prescriptions to be filled, wait in line again to pay. Then go home and get a call from your daughter saying that she is out of her ADD medicine and needs it ASAP as exams start Monday.  So you get to do it all over again...but this time you add in a stop at FedEx.

Frankly I don't give a damn if every Tom, Dick, and Harry in the country finds a way to get their hands on Ritalin,   I only care that our family members who need it, get it, without me jumping through hoops every single month.

Okay, I showed you my pain, now you show me yours...or better yet, you be the marketing genius and figure out a way to resolve mine-and then I'll actually have some freed-up brain space to identify and resolve yours!