My previous post on our appearance at the NY Region ACOG meeting got me thinking about different ways we can tell the Veritech story. This led to the quick video post you can see below. Over the years, we have produced a lot of interactive training programs, some of which you can see on our portfolio page. The advantages of interactive training include increased knowledge retention and better tracking and reporting capabilities. There is a cost savings, too. Instead of producing hundreds of paper-based materials every time a new training session begins, interactive training exists in one place, ususally online, and can be accessed over and over again, increasing ROI every time it is used. Anticipating that the content may need updates occassionally over time, we take a thoughtful approach to producing the materials so we can make updates easily and cost effectively.
Enough of me writing about it. I used my Flip Video to record Joel Katon, a Veritech producer, as he talks about the project. Enjoy!
“What does Veritech do?” I’m frequently asked this question and find that the answer isn’t always as simple as I, or the inquisitor, would like it to be. At our core, we’re a multimedia company, but to end there doesn’t do justice to the work we do. So instead of trying to explain what we do, perhaps talking about where I spent my Saturday would help.
“More people die each year from medical errors than they do from car accidents or breast cancer.” This harsh statistic was delivered by the moderator of the patient safety panel discussion at the American College of Obstetrician and Gynecologists (NY Region) conference in New York City Steve Graziano and I attened on Saturday. While neither of us are doctors, we were invited to participate on the panel because Veritech has been playing a role the last several years in helping to reduce medical errors in hospitals. We produce interactive clinician training and education programs, usually in conjunction with a hospital or learning instituion. For the ACOG meeting, we presented our program on Shoulder Dystocia, a continuing medical education credit-eligible program we co-license with Baystate Health Systems.
With shoulder dystocia — which occurs when the infant’s shoulders do not deliver easily despite the mother’s bearing down efforts, uterine contractions and gentle traction to the fetal head provided by the birth attendant – if the doctor or nurse can quickly recognize the signs and perform the appropriate maneuvers, they can avoid causing life-altering nerve damage to the baby. Our Shoulder Dystocia program is being used by OB/GYN deparments to train personnel in order quickly recognize the signs and eliminate errors associated with a shoulder dystocia in any delivery situation. In addition, it is being offered by malpractice insurance companies to their insureds as a way to reduce malpractice cost and exposure.
So do we do multimedia production? Sure. But with an interactive program like Shoulder Dystocia, with the abilty to train and certify clinicians so that a life-altering medical error can be eliminated completely, I like to think we do a little more than just make videos.
To see a sample of the program, visit our portfolio page on the Veritech Corporation Website.
Peace,
Dave
Here’s a little video of Steve preparing for the presentation:
Uberproducer Marty Langford and I are on the road this week shooting video for a client in Las Vegas. I’m still clarifying how much we can say about the client, so hopefully more details about the shoot will emerge in the next day or so. In the meantime, you can follow me on Twitter to get real time updates. I’ll post to the blog when I can and will post video to our YouTube site as it becomes available.
Have you checked out Viddler yet? It’s a video publishing site. Think a cooler, hipper YouTube with more functionality. For a real interactive experience, viewers can comment in real time on specific sections of the video by adding a comment to the timeline, as well as add tags. They’re also doing some innovative things with some new branding functionality you won’t find anywhere else, such as the ability to easily create your own video player.
We have a couple of videos on Viddler, including our commercial reel. Normally I would embed the video here, but you should check out the site and learn more about their services.
I expect to be working with Viddler in the future. We have some clients who can benefit from their services and I’ve already had a conversation with Rob Sandie, founder of Viddler, about how we might work together.
It was a busy week with a lot happening. It began with an overnight trip to New Jersey and ended with an RFP response and a series of calls connected to new business. All good stuff. Some other thoughts and highlights from the week:
Loved the MLB trade deadline activity this week. As a Yankee fan, I was loving their acquisitions. And to make the week even more enjoyable, Manny goes to the NL and the Mets don’t make any move at all. Tampa Bay also does nothing. Great stuff.
My sister had her baby this week.
My wife picked up a bike for free that was left over from a tag sale. It works. It’s not fancy. I’m happy.
Several good client meetings this week.
There’s probably more, but it’s the end of the day on Friday and this is the best I can do right now.
I love my dad. He’s a lot of things — wise, generous, fun-loving, retired. And he’s NOT a lot of things, too, like very tech savvy. He doesn’t spend much time on the Web and has even told me — on more than one occassion — about the sweet deal he has had from AOL. He was paying something like $5.00 per month for three hours of dial-up Internet access. (I think that deal changed. He’s not happy.) And an even sweeter deal for him is that when he wants broadband access — mostly to play hearts online – he “drops by” my brother or sister’s place and uses their computers. (That’s for another post.)
You can imagine my suprise, then, when I heard him telling my father-in-law about his recent purchase of digital camera. It wasn’t the fact that he bought the camera that caught my attention. He’s had digital cameras before. What caught my attention is that he originally planned to purchase a new Nikon to replace his broken Nikon. However, after checking out some blogs, he learned that Canon had a camera that was more reliable and had better features than the comprable Nikon. The user reviews were positive and persuasive, resulting in my father purchasing the Canon over the Nikon.
I am convinced that there is no way he would have bought the Canon without reading blog posts from sources he found reliable and trustworthy.
This is just one tiny example of the transformation taking place in a Web 2.0 world. The good news, I think, is that the number of content creators is small compared to the content consumers. So if you can create and maintain consistent messages, and do it well, then you can have an impact. It worked for Canon, at least this time.
I remember it as if it was yesterday. I was in grade school. It was recess. My friend asked me if I heard the news. “What news?” I said.
“Mikey, the kid from the Life cereal commercials, is dead,” she told me. “He was eating Pop Rocks and drank some soda. His stomach exploded.”
And so, one of the more famous urban lengends, continued to find the life on the playground of a parochial school in South Jersey. I don’t know how my friend got the news. She probably got it the way another friend of mine heard about Mikey — I told him what was passed along to me. There was no Internet, no social networking platform. Just good old word of mouth.
The reason I remembered this story is because yesterday a link to this story came across my Twitter page.
I had to chuckle as I read it. Evidently, there’s a rumor circulating that Jared, the pitchman for Subway sandwiches had died. It’s a rumor that had been debunked a while ago.
Of course, this led to some discussion on the Smart People blog posting about the need to fact check, etc. But I think the more interesting discussion is around what appears to be a basic characteristic of the human experience, which is the need to share and gather information with and from one another. Without this desire, social media probably doesn’t work, right? What we’re seeing with Twitter, Plurk, MySpace and Facebook are just new ways, to some degree, to do what happened on the playground at recess. Today, it’s just more high tech, and, hopefully, more accurate and helpful information.
So it seems to me that whether it’s Pop Rock or Pastrami Sandwiches, the need to know and the need to share is something we all have in common.
