A new paradigm in elder care medicine

Update:   despite having left a message on this company's voice mail that I'm not interested and don't want their solicitations, another one (addressed to me, not just to "resident" as some are) arrived this morning.

This one offers a week of freebies:   Day one is groceries, day two is safety supplies, day three is household supplies, day four is greeting cards, and day five is a shopping spree.  Disclaimers:  limitations apply.

I called again and as usual, got only a voice mail.   I left a second "not interested" message and also advised that if they sent another unwanted solicitation I was going to file charges against them with the Better Business Bureau (although I'm not sure that would really do much good.)

I ask myself again:  what kind of legitimate medical practice has free giveaway days, and solicits people to patronize them with these kinds of lures?  (Maybe they also handout lollipops to patients?)

So I did more checking and stumbled across some very interesting and insightful former employee observations.    I won't quote directly as I don't have permission and suspect that there's some kind of hidden link b/c when I "liked" the critical comments, the screen froze, and I couldn't return to it.  Tried repeatedly;  I was locked out unless I got in through Google or FB.   No way.

I'm curious:  has anyone ever experienced this kind of "grand opening" and solicitation as well as promises of limited free groceries and medical supplies?  

Interesting:  one of the former employees, using professional business grammar, wrote about having to stand at the beginning of the work day and recite the company's values.     There was more, but that's a far as I could get w/o being blocked from seeing the rest of the criticisms.

I began to wonder if this was a parody of some of the big, powerful, tech firms, or a reflection of the cultural domination of this company.  Regardless, it's so aggressive that I find it offensive.     They'll never get any business from me.

Oh, and their mission statement indicates they target "underserved areas."   That's very telling.

@GardenArtist:
I have worked, as I've mentioned, providing outsourced sys-admin aka cybersecurity services for smaller companies that couldn't afford to hire a dedicated IT person. However I built long and trusting relationships with some, many of which were located far far away from me(but still in the USA).
I've done this as an employee for a business and also as sole proprietor/contractor.
At work we were taught how to best pitch our services, to every unique type of business, we had: law firms, insurance firms, construction businesses, engineering companies/startups, and of course, every form of private medical practice.
So before I was ever allowed to speak with anyone at a medical practice, I had to study HIPAA.
All business have very tangible threats, that, no offence, go far beyond undesirable ads, should their data become compromised.
This is true in double, or treble(new legal term!!) for when there's a actual legislation that strictly dictates compliance. I've dealt with HIPAA for with Doctors, for a few different even stricter compliance laws when dealing with finance/investment firms, and of course law firms.

I'm open to being corrected, but despite the fact that -usually- the malicious actors that I have to carefully study and always be up to date with, are criminals. Specifically hackers/financial fraud - NOT the sort one would call 'white collar'(that's WAY over my head). In short, protecting identities and their credit card numbers etc.

Medical records are totally different, as far as I understand.
1. they don't contain very much value for a financially motivated hacker
2 they DO contain A LOT of data for the behemoth corporations that we call Medical Insurance companies.
If one gets diagnosed with having HIV, their insurance premiums will sky rocket.
Then there are other collateral concerns, riding with that example, if I have HIV, a company might not hire me for a career path, knowing that additional effort to train me to their internal operations, culture, and so on, would be a poor investment for them.
Needless to say, if you wanted to kill someone, as many books and TV shows have shown us, getting their medical records makes it WAY easier when the killer discovers they have a severe allergy a la anaphylactic shock to some thing random like macademia nuts.

Fun Fact: The only professional role besides 'attending doctor/surgeon' that is HIPAA exempt, is an elderly protective services investigator. (I would speculate whatever the child protective services equivalent is, also has such powers)
But unlike the other two examples, nobody seems to know this. And, unlike a doctor, APS investigators are awarded both criminal and civil immunity in the course of their investigation.



But yeah my mother doesn't find it particularly pleasant that she's lately been receiving a burst of paper junkmail marketing life insurance, addressig her by her name right on the envelope.

I guess a final point worth mentioning, of all the types of data I have been tasked with overseeing, and holding the ultimate responsibility for, if it were to either be somehow lost, destroyed, or compromised by an adverse party, the MOST sensitive data was not subject to any sort of legislation at all.

e.g.
- Massive amount of data at a drug discovery lab, they were working on a cure for a certain incurable disease, that isn't very well known. Thus, there was only one other Discovery Lab they were competing with. Whoever finds the cure first, sells it to Pfizer, and makes billions of return on their. i dunno. say 100 million invested. The other lab shuts down and the funder writes it off as a loss.
So I had two stressors in such a situation. 1. corporate espionage 2. Fire/flood / etc. causing years worth of scientific research to be lost forever.
IMHO, HIPAA had to be created because small practices don't handle matters that would be vulnerable to such things, and they may not even understand them(some omissions left out for....)

Nerdmafia, so you're a gamesman, huh?  

I am familiar with venture capital, venture capitalists, and angel investors as well.    Some are good; some aren't.    That's a topic for another insightful dialogue, but just to address my point on data silos and their "hindrance" of access to valuable information...

I can't locate all the information I researched a few years ago on the firm responsible for managing data collected for specific patients, but my journey took me to the comment I  made earlier, about segregation of data silos and its effect on "providing" "options" to patients.   

This article though addresses the issue of data silos; it's clear to me that they should segregate data collected through, for and by medical entities, or patients directly when advised to input medical histories onto websites.     

https://hbr.org/2016/12/breaking-down-data-silos

It was this "segregation" that one of the VC'ists commented was a hindrance to providing suggestions of good care, etc., (blah, blah) to patients. ...as if I need advice from a venture capitalist on good health as I grow older.

You wrote about an entirely different aspect, that of the value of medical inventions, techniques, etc., in providing top notch health care, and perhaps saving someone's life.  That wasn't part of my thought process.   It's what's done with the medical records of such a patient, and others.

Are those records really protected?    Do the data storage companies which host hospital records really keep them separate, and safely stored, emphasizing the security and privacy of the records?    I recall one so-called "cloud" breach.  How and why did that happen, and were the patients' whose records were exposed suffer, or were they pestered by robo callers?   Does anyone really know?

CVS recently announced a data breach of COVID 19 data:

"An unsecured database belonging to healthcare and retail giant CVS containing more than 1 billion data points was inadvertently posted online earlier this year..."

"Whether or not those searches can be tied to a particular person who used the CVS websites depends on what else they entered in the search bar..."

"In many cases, for unknown reasons, people who searched on the CVS site entered their email address, which could have been linked to a unique identifier attached to each customer."

And

"He said that the findings also showed how tracking website use, even where no obvious personal data is being collected, can be a risk for companies with a large online presence. 'Organizations collect this valuable data and use this information for analytics, customer management, or marketing needs. At the same time consumers want privacy and to have more control over their data and how companies or social media providers use that data.' " 

Note the use for "marketing needs."   

https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2021/06/16/cvs-accidentally-leaks-1-billion-website-records-including-covid-19-vaccine-searches/

And BTW, I'd be interested in your explanation of how companies that hire people who have difficulty with English access the data to call us older folks.    If you haven't been pestered by back pain, back brace and other annoying calls, you can expect that as you age.   

These jerks are getting information from somewhere as to people like me in specific age groups.

Haha. You may have just experienced the worst thing possible from me. A rhetorical 'poke' with the concealed intent of enticing more conversation and mutual enlightenment ;)

Indeed, anyone that has seen their home country in economic ruin, and actually observed the effects of a 'mafia; on the citizens, understands how quickly Hollywood's portrayal of mobsters and their mystique , and just any notion of them being cool at all - just vaporizes into non existence. And there's really nothing funny about it(though I laugh anyway - maybe it keeps me alive)

nerdmafia on the other hand, there is only of, and it's me. And i'm harmless!

And ok, it wasn't a matter of specificity, It was more a matter of the usage of the term, venture capital, as a pejorative. I presumed perhaps you weren't savvy to that terminology, as that word is often just interpreted to mean "very capitalist!" , and except for an old fashioned negative association based on some bamboozling of brilliant inventors like Eli Whitney or Nicola Tesla, nowadays Venture Capital is one business that's pretty much viewed as benevolent , as well as fascinating, by....anyone? Perhaps I have some regional biases, as I live near Cambridge, MA with all of the MIT/Startup culture. And the valley north of the city is hotbed specifically, for innovation in medical technology. I've worked with some of these companies for just sys-admin/tech type of support, but I know people that have made material contributions to innovations such as fiber optic scopes that are so tiny they are inserted into someone's vein and they quickly are able to image everything inside of the veins/arteries and find the exact location of cholesterol clogage or blood clot and save a persons life with hardly any additional effort. Needless to say, not only is venture capital a requirement for such things, but I've even worked with the even more advanced equivalent, of 'product development', where basically an inventor comes in with nothing but an idea, and a team of every type of engineer and expert helps them realize their dream, without even asking for any sort of shares or patent rights. Just for a fee.


But, I"m very curious about these malevolent ...silos? =P
I hope they're not also missile silos!

NerdMafia, just checked, especially the wording in my post.   I think I should have written that it's a venture capitalized firm, which it is.   My lack of specificity implied it was involved in VC operations; I think it was instead apparently the beneficiary of VC capital for its start up operations.

My sincere apologies for the lack of specificity.

I'm sending you a link by PM.  

For those who've read this before, I apologize; it's primarily for NerdMafia.    I learned about the relationship of VC firms to medicine when I researched the company hosting medical information input by patients for cataract surgery.   I traced that company, then its Board members, then some of the literature, which is where I learned just a bit about data silos and their apparent negative impact on those who seek to gather medical information, apparently for marketing purposes.

I'll get back to you with your other questions in a few days.   I need to review and get all the citations right, as well as explore some issues you addressed which I didn't.

And thanks for your observations, especially the inference as opposed to specificity.   

But you must promise you send any mafiosos  after me!

BTW, I get healthcare solicitations periodically; in fact, the local community publishes its periodic updates and the back page typically is an advertisement for a local medical doctor (a dentist if I remember correctly) with a lusty grin on his face and his arm around a buxom woman in a nurse's uniform.   

@GardenArtist, your information and especially opinion has a high standard, and value. Could you elaborate at all on the nitty gritties of how you researched this outfit? In general in the US any sort of marketing or advertising of healthcare period, with a maybe a few distinct exceptions, is deemed unethical and rarely happens. I would have though it was illegal, if I wasn't an immigrant still fluent in my native language(A sizable portion of Brooklyn, NY is covered in fliers and billboards of fiercely competing Russian healthcare..businesses, but real doctors mostly. )
Were you able to figure out what sort of business entity this was, i'd imagine one of the types of a Corporation?
Also sorry to nitpick, but, a Venture Capital firm is a lender that specializes in funding and 'incubating' innovative technology, as well as protecting and patenting it.

Depressing to think how many people will think "dedicated" means something.
Best avoided, I agree.