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Families Need You: A Thanksgiving Opportunity

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Thanksgiving and the rest of the holiday season are right around the corner. Smart health and patient advocates and care managers can find this season to be a golden opportunity to expand their reach in many positive ways. The holidays are family times. Generations come together. Inevitably someone is facing a health and/or health system challenge. Aunt Joan has a new cancer diagnosis and hasn’t even considered a second opinion. Dad needs help sorting out his meds, while daughter Francine questions about whether he’s taking the right drugs at the right times, or whether the prescriptions he’s taking are causing […]

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All We Really Need to Know About Being Good Advocates We Learned in Kindergarten

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kids image

As children across the US and Canada start kindergarten this time of the year, I’m reminded of Robert Fulghum’s book, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, a classic, published more than 30 years ago. I’ve actually written about advocates and the kindergarten principles before, years ago, as applied to some real negativity we were experiencing as a profession then. But today’s piece is updated, much more positive, and contains some further advice not shared then. So much of this kindergarten wisdom is appropriate to our successful running of an independent advocacy or care management practice –

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The Search Meter, Customer Service, and Fulfilling Your Need to Know

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needle in a haystack

In your pre-advocacy lifetime, you may never have thought you would be dealing with “customer service.” And yet, now that you’ve started working with clients, that’s what you’re required to do every time you interface with a customer (client) in any way: in-person, through phone calls, or email, or even postal mail. Your website represents customer service. Even the signature on your email is a form of customer service. Most new business owners who have never before lived in a customer service world believe that all they need to do is listen and respond. But that’s really only a start.

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Atychi-what? Overcoming Atychiphobia

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feargirl2

Over the years, dozens of professional advocate wannabes have talked to me about fear, including Fear of failure Fear of doing the wrong thing for a client Fear of failure Fear of losing their savings Fear of failure Fear of making a mistake in their work Fear of failure Fear of standing up to authority Fear of failure If your fears stand in the way of your success, then you have only two choices:

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How Does a Patient Choose the Best Advocate to Hire?

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I’ve been working on updating the AdvoConnection Directory website because it was time, because search engines look favorably upon updates. And because my not-frequent-enough review of the site’s analytics produced a big surprise! A surprise I’ll share with you here today. To be clear – no changes were made to the actual search and profile areas – those all belong to our listed advocates who make those changes themselves. Instead, I edited and updated the support pages – everything from the homepage, to the About Us page, to the “how to choose and interview an advocate” page. For some background:

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The Momma Test

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Portrait of an old woman with her adult daughter.

Over the years, one of my favorite things to do has been to work with / speak to / address college students. They are young, aren’t yet set in their ways, still hope to save the world, are naive to the “follow the money” aspects of healthcare and, honestly, it’s just plain fun. Last week I had the privilege of participating in an ethics debate for a well-known and respected university in a course called Controversies in Healthcare (medical, legal, and bio ethics), to a combination group of law students and medical students, on the topic of independent advocacy –

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What Do You Want to Learn?

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While many independent advocates and care managers spent their holiday time either celebrating, spending time with their families, and/or putting out fires for clients… I’ve been right here at my desk during the holidays, preparing for THE LAUNCH. It’s been SUCH a long time coming…many years, really. Certainly not because the will wasn’t there, nor because the technology wasn’t available. I plead only the lack of enough hours in my days along with a few conflicting priorities (like completing the launch of patient advocate certification, and rebuilding the AdvoConnection profiles site, and moving 1200 miles!). Those aren’t excuses. They were

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