To quote the A-Team’s John “Han­ni­bal” Smith (aka actor George Pep­pard), “I love it when a plan comes together.” (I’m a child of the 80s; so sue me.)

The thing to remem­ber about the A-Team is that they typ­i­cally were called in by reg­u­lar folks who were in des­per­ate straights and had run out of time and options. And yet, despite work­ing under pres­sure and an ever-tightening time line, the team always had a plan. And they worked that plan.

Last Fri­day, as I worked fever­ishly to get out of the office so I could enjoy my three-day week­end vaca­tion, I was asked by two val­ued clients to crank out two very impor­tant rush news releases–one about Mont­gomery Inn’s “All You Can Eat” Ribs spe­cial to cel­e­brate its Boathouse restaurant’s 20th year in busi­ness and one about Fis­cher Homes’ “Get Mov­ing Amer­ica!” buyer pro­tec­tion pro­gram. I wrote both releases and sent them to their respec­tive clients before I left the office. While I was dri­ving back to town on Mon­day, my account exec, Jill, man­aged all edits and rewrites with the two clients and lined up the appro­pri­ate dis­tri­b­u­tion net­works for each. Today, Jill final­ized both releases and sent them before lunch.

It’s not yet end of day, and the releases have net­ted the very print, broad­cast and Web cov­er­age we were shoot­ing for. Best yet, at least one client has per­son­ally shared their appre­ci­a­tion for the quick work and the better-than-expected results. The point here is that a “plan” doesn’t have to take weeks to develop and 12 months to imple­ment. A plan can sim­ply be the reap­pli­ca­tion of an exist­ing strate­gic process that when mar­ried with tar­geted cre­ativ­ity and ded­i­ca­tion can deliver desired results and exceed expectations.

Today proves that in just 2.5 busi­ness days, tal­ented, hard-working indi­vid­u­als can cre­ate a plan and “work that plan.”

I love it when a plan comes together.

We at O’Keeffe feel like proud papas this week. Our client, Gen­eral Data Com­pany, was fea­tured on CBS’s The Doc­tors on Mon­day, Feb. 2. Visit Gen­eral Data on The Doc­tors to see a video clip of the episode.

Gen­eral Data’s Per­sonal ID Patient Wrist­bands, which include a bar code with a patient’s com­plete his­tory along with a photo of that patient, were used as an exam­ple of the new way to track patients in hos­pi­tal set­tings. Only recently have many of the hos­pi­tals and health care orga­ni­za­tions in the U.S. begun estab­lish­ing a stan­dard for track­ing patients within and between hos­pi­tals. And stan­dards have yet to be adopted across the indus­try. The issue, as dis­cussed on the Feb. 2 episode of The Doc­tors, is that each hos­pi­tal or hos­pi­tal sys­tem uses its own mech­a­nisms for track­ing patients dur­ing their stays. These mechanisms–typically col­ored bracelets–help doc­tors and nurses know which med­ica­tions a patient is tak­ing, what other treat­ments they are receiv­ing, per­ti­nent aller­gies, etc. Due to a lack of stan­dards between dif­fer­ent hos­pi­tal sys­tems, how­ever, seri­ous prob­lems can occur.

Often, doc­tors work for more than one hos­pi­tal. Also, patients are fre­quently trans­ferred from one hos­pi­tal to another, within dif­fer­ent sys­tems, in fact. Both of these sit­u­a­tions can result in doc­tors and nurses in one hos­pi­tal mis­read­ing a patient’s ID bracelet from another hos­pi­tal. A pink bracelet in Hos­pi­tal A can mean some­thing entirely dif­fer­ent from a sim­i­lar pink bracelet used by Hos­pi­tal B.

Gen­eral Data is help­ing hos­pi­tal sys­tems solve this prob­lem by cre­at­ing sim­ple indi­vid­ual wrist­bands that include a photo of each patient and a bar code that pro­vides all rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion for that patient. The wrist­band is spe­cially designed in Gen­eral Data’s lab­o­ra­to­ries to with­stand extreme tem­per­a­tures and envi­ron­ments so that the wrist­bands can be worn dur­ing pro­ce­dures, x-rays, etc. The bar codes can be eas­ily scanned into hand­held devices car­ried by a hospital’s med­ical staff, which imme­di­ately inform the staff of all rel­e­vant patient data before any med­ica­tions or pro­ce­dures are administered.

The advan­tages of using bar-coded wrist­bands instead of other iden­ti­fi­ca­tion tools is that poten­tial errors are avoided expo­nen­tially and effi­ciency in treat­ing patients is increased, which lead to a more sat­is­fac­tory expe­ri­ence for the patient, cost sav­ings for health­care orga­ni­za­tions and, most impor­tantly, increased patient safety.

As for how The Doc­tors found Gen­eral Data and its Per­sonal ID Wrist­bands, the show’s pro­duc­ers Googled for ways to track hos­pi­tal patients. And Gen­eral Data was at the top of their search. Why are we proud? Because two core com­po­nents of Gen­eral Data’s mar­ket­ing strat­egy are inno­v­a­tive pub­lic rela­tions and a com­mit­ted online con­tent devel­op­ment strat­egy on the part of Gen­eral Data’s mar­ket­ing team. In today’s world, both efforts con­tribute directly to enhanced search engine rankings.

We’re proud to be a part of Gen­eral Data’s team!