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theserpentlife · 5 years

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Chapter 1: The Fall

hey loves, so here’s the first chapter of my riverdale rewrite based on this storyline and character synopsis i did awhile back. this is my first time writing fiction like ever and it was really fun and i hope you guys enjoy it and let me know what you guys. send me nice messages pls.

Recommended Song to accompany read; Always forever - The Cults

As the raging summer takes its last humid breath, trees morph from tones of lush greens into assorted hues of red and gold. Brightly tinted maple leaves fall from the trees like confetti, a triumphant declaration of the beginning of the crisp and cool autumn. The season of fall had come to Riverdale, a small town nestled inconspicuously on the northern border. The season of autumn held great significance for the townspeople. It marked the beginning of the new school year for the town’s youth. A change of hands between the elder of the teens who would be leaving town for their college lives and the younger bright-eyed ones on the cusps of their new lives as high school students.

Fall was also the prime harvesting season for the town’s number one export - it’s rich tapestry of sickly sweet maple syrup. An abundance of sticky gold bled bountifully out of the trunks of the tall maple trees that surrounded the town. Steeped in decades of tradition and history, the Blossom Maple Farms, founded by the descendants of the Blossom Family, was truly the bedrock of the town’s economy.

In the winter of 1998, under the celestial glow of the full moon, the next in line to the empire would be born. An heiress. Cheryl Blossom had skin as pale as snow and hair as red as flames. As soon as she had left the confines of her mother's womb she had already committed a grave sin - being born a daughter to parents who had prayed ceaselessly for a son. Imagine the wrath that rained on her after Penelope was told she could no longer bear any other children. Cheryl Blossom’s very existence marked the end of the Blossom bloodline.

__________

Archie Andrews threw his freshly pressed light blue shirt over his broad shoulders and slowly worked his way up the buttons. As soon as he reached the very last one on the top, a bizarre scene unfolded in the reflection of his bathroom mirror. He saw that his hands were replaced with much paler ones, nails long and exquisitely polished in a deep red color. The air around him had suddenly gone cold. He was paralyzed by the sight before him and yet he could not look away. It was as if the cool wind had frozen him in place too. A sickeningly sweet aroma swarmed around him and his eyes darted anxiously as if trying to trace its source before fixating on his reflection once more. The mysterious hand was now gone and so was the smell. Archie swallowed hard at the lump that had gathered in his throat. It was probably just his imagination playing tricks on him, he reasoned. After all, he spent most of the night before tossing and turning in bed.

He takes a handful of his watered-down hair wax and slathers it generously onto his saffron hued locks. As expected the wax doesn’t take well to his hair. "Damn it." He grunts in annoyance before slathering another dollop, this time running his hands through his hair with increasingly aggressive strokes. His rage interrupted by a sudden weight pressing down on his right shoulder. His fear-ridden body jumps in response to the unwelcomed stimuli. “Woah Arch, I didn’t mean to scare you. I thought you heard me come in.” It was Betty Cooper. “You okay?” Betty's brows were furrowed softly in concern. Archie's usual warm and rosy complexion was drained of all its color. She ran her hands across the length of his back in soft and soothing strokes. Her touch did wonders in soothing him. “Y-yeah I’m good.” "You sure?" "Yeah, Bets." this time Archie manages to conjure up a soft smile. Betty mirrors her childhood sweetheart melting into a soft smile herself. Her eyes trail the entire length of Archie’s body before fixating on his hazel brown eyes. “You look handsome.” she cooed. Archie couldn’t help but break into a light chuckle before averting his gaze away from her crystal blue eyes. Archie always had a habit of looking away or biting his lips whenever he felt sheepish and Betty loved that about him.

She brushed back the loose strands of hair that had fallen on his forehead and adjusted his navy blue varsity jacket, making sure to dust off any loose traces of lint. He instinctively stepped forward, eliminating the distance between them wanting nothing more but to take in the familiar aroma of her rose-scented perfume and the slight traces of her magnolia shampoo. He lifted his hands to embrace her face, thumbs softly stroking the pink of her cheeks. “I don’t know what I would do without you, Betty Cooper.”

______________

It’s twenty minutes before the start of the first period and the schoolyard is teeming with cliques of excited teens all engrossed in exchanging stories about how they had spent their summer. Right across the street, a sleek black BMW pulls into the street. Its tinted windows rolled down to reveal a raven-haired teen peering discreetly at the scene before her.

“Andre, my dear, you can stop the car here.”

“But Miss-”

“It’s okay Andre, I prefer to walk.”.

Veronica Lodge had a plan. After her family's not-so-graceful fall from high society in New York, Veronica wanted nothing more than to detach herself from the shame of her past life. Opting instead to forge a new one for herself. She looked down to inspect her outfit one last time. A simple black dress, sinched fashionably at the waist with a thin violet belt. Her hands found its way to her collarbone and lingered on her bare skin where her prized pearl necklace used to lay.

"No need to pick me up later. I'll see you at the Pembrooke." Andre nodded, pausing thoughtfully for a second before flashing a warm smile at Veronica's reflection in the front view mirror. "Have a nice day at school, miss." she heard Andre say before closing the car door behind her. Nice day. I sure hope so she thought. Veronica wasn't expecting much from her new life in Riverdale, after all, she wasn't planning on staying for long. She figured it was best if she kept a low profile and made a graceful exit when it came time for her family to return to their lives in New York. No attachments, no drama. The lesser her classmates knew about her the better.

Inscribed in gold on the school’s brick facade read “Riverdale High”. Here goes nothing. As soon as she pushed open the rust-tinted front doors, she found herself right in the middle of it all. Students gathered in front of their lockers, chatting with friends and getting their books in order. All eyes were drawn to her immediately. You see in a small town like Riverdale, everybody knew everybody. They all shared the same street, grew up in the same schools. It was an understatement to say that she stood out like a sore thumb. She eased into a slight smile hoping it would soften her image, but her attempts were received with snickers and ridicule instead. There was no time for pleasantries anyway, the first period was coming up and she hadn't found her locker yet. “431.431.431” she repeated as her eyes scanned the row of deep blue lockers on either side of the hallway. “Veronica Lodge?” She froze in her tracks as if struck by a freeze gun. No way. Was it someone she knew? Perhaps someone from New York? This couldn't be happening. Her cover already blown and all before the first period?

She turned slowly on her heels to meet her fate and to her surprise and great relief it was a new face, someone she hadn't met before. Standing before her was an all-too-enthusiastic, blonde ponytail donning Betty Cooper. “I’m Betty Cooper, I’m on the welcoming committee. I’m supposed to give you a tour of the school? You know get you oriented on our programs and clubs and where the restrooms are...”. Her cheerful demeanor and upbeat voice threw Veronica off. I guess she wasn't used to the warm hospitality. An ambiguously awkward period of silence passed between the two before Betty let out a nervous laugh, embarrassment coloring her cheeks a bright pink. “Right Betty, nice to meet you". Veronica extended her hand for a handshake and Betty gladly returned the gesture.

“So, have you found your locker yet?”.

“No, actually, I’ve been walking in circles for the past five minutes. Do you know where 431 is?" Betty nodded and mouthed an Ah-hah before leading Veronica further down the hall. “431, here we are.”. Veronica entered the code for the lock and viola her life at Riverdale High had officially begun.

________

“So here we have the girls’ locker room, that's the gym hall over there, and the cafeteria is just down the hall to the left.”. The all-inclusive Riverdale High campus tour was in full swing, led by Riverdale's golden girl no less. Veronica nodded nonchalantly, a polite gesture in acknowledgment of Betty's forthcoming reception. Veronica, however, took little effort to remember the details of the tour seeing as her time at Riverdale High would be brief.

“Oh, and this is the Blue & Gold-" Veronica's ear perked at the noticeable boost in enthusiasm in Betty's tone. You'd think the blonde couldn't get any peppier than this. "You’ll find me here most of the time, I’m the Chief Editor here.”. The pair stepped into the dimly-lit space, a small classroom haphazardly converted into a publishing center for the school's paper. Tall dusty shelves lined the corners of the room with volumes of worn and aged books displayed sparsely on its bones. Their workstations buried in tall stacks of paper, several empty coffee mugs, and typewriters. Talk about old-fashioned. Who knew moving to a small town meant going back in time. “You know we’re always looking for writers so if-” “No thanks, I’m not much of a writer myself,” Veronica interjects, ‘But...I love what you’ve done with the place,” she rejoined, feeling her initial rejection of Betty's offer was rather crass for the good-hearted blonde.

Seated at the very corner of the space was Jughead Jones. A pair of gold-rimmed glasses perched precariously on the edge of his sharp nose. He sips his black coffee with one hand while the other dances frantically over the keyboard of his MacBook. Paying absolutely no heed to the presence of the two. “Jughead, this is Veronica Lodge she’s-” “New girl I know.” he interrupts, not even bothering to pry his gaze from his laptop to meet theirs. “This is Jughead, he’s one of the best writers in this school. His pieces are phenomenal.”.

“Well, I guess I should start reading the school paper then.” Veronica thought she should offer a light compliment, perhaps as a way to break the ice. She reached out her freshly manicured hand to shake his but was met with an unfazed Jughead still blissfully engrossed in his writing. She retrieved her hand, ego sorely bruised by the boy's crude demeanor. It took everything in her not to roll her eyes and return his hostility with a snarky remark. But she was new Veronica and new Veronica was not going to make an enemy out of her classmate on the very first day of Sophmore year.

Just as Betty was about to usher Veronica out, they hear Jughead read the summary of his latest piece aloud. A seemingly innocent behavior laced with malice of course. A deliberate attempt to rattle the cage. You see Jughead Jones was a bit of a sadist, getting a kick out of ticking people off every once in a while. He reclined into his seat, fingers interlocked behind his head as he began the narration of his latest piece. “Dark and mysterious family moves into town on the very same night Riverdale's scarlet heiress Cheryl Blossom goes missing - an awful coincidence perhaps?” “Jug!” a wide-eyed Betty scolds.

“Excuse me?” Veronica glared in disbelief. “Oh, it’s just a piece I’m working on about the disappearance of Cheryl Blossom.” Jughead gets up from his seat to come face to face with a fuming Veronica. His cold blue eyes peering straight through her dark ones. She couldn't help but scoff at Jughead's ridiculous attempt at yellow journalism.

“So let me get this straight, you think I body-snatched some girl I don’t even know, just so I could take her place in some local high school in the middle of nowhere?” Jug shrugged nonchalantly. “It’s just a working theory.”. Unbelievable! The guy practically knew her for all of five minutes and already he’s pegging her for a kidnapper. “Come on Veronica, let's go.” Betty ushered Veronica out of the room before looking back once more to shoot Jug a disapproving look.

“Betty, I have a question.”

"Yup?" the blonde hummed, eyes glued to the pages of her baby blue leather notebook. She ran her index finger down the rows of her handwritten agenda making sure she had covered all the bases of Veronica's orientation tour. "Who the hell is Cheryl Blossom?”. Betty blinked up at Veronica, her organized thoughts completely disarrayed. She wasn't prepared for this. Cheryl Blossom's disappearing act of the summer was not on the agenda for today and frankly, she didn't know how to describe Cheryl, well not with decent adjectives at least. "Well, she umm... she's-". Betty fumbled over her words before giving up completely seeing as Veronica herself was absorbed in the sight before them. A locker plastered with personal messages and flowers with a row of lit candles lined up neatly at its foot. A bright red banner hung from the ceiling just above it reading "Come home, Cheryl.".

_____________________________________

ok so should i continue with a chapter 2 or lets can this mess - what do ya’ll think? sound off in the comments.

#riverdale #riverdale fanfic #riverdale fanfiction #archie andrews #betty cooper #veronica lodge #jughead jones #cheryl blossom

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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The Floodgates Open on Trump

David Remnick

Published September 30, 2019 | New Yorker | Posted October 1, 2019 |

Shortly after eight on Monday morning, the President of the United States, making maximal use of his “executive time,” wielded his smartphone to issue a legal threat against the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. It is worth reading the missive from @realDonaldTrump in full:

“Rep. Adam Schiff illegally made up a FAKE & terrible statement, pretended it to be mine as the most important part of my call to the Ukrainian President, and read it aloud to Congress and the American people. It bore NO relationship to what I said on the call. Arrest for Treason?”

Were the collective nerve endings of the electorate not so frayed and numbed by now, we might be even more alive to the ugliness of this message from the White House. One of the consequences of the Trump Presidency is the way that it constantly diminishes our expectations of anything other than hideous rhetoric and action. But there are those who are intensely aware of the potential consequences of such a threat. Sources close to Schiff told The New Yorker on Monday that Democrats in Congress are deeply worried about the President using Twitter to incite violence and to direct it at specific members.

The threat to Schiff via Twitter came just a few days after the President, speaking at the United States Mission to the United Nations, said that whoever provided information to the whistle-blower about his July 25th telephone call with the President of Ukraine was “close to a spy.” Trump went on to wax nostalgic about how spies were dealt with “in the old days”—with the death penalty, in other words. “As soon as I heard that, I thought, He has the soul and the mind of an authoritarian,” Nicholas Burns, a former high-ranking diplomat who has served in Republican and Democratic Administrations, told me. “What other President in American history would say that?”

The offhanded encouragement of vengeance, even violence, is hardly new or unusual for Trump. Some selections from the anthology of incitement:

“If you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would ya?” he told the crowd at a February, 2016, rally in Iowa. “I promise you, I will pay the legal fees.”

“In the good old days, they’d rip him out of that seat so fast. But, today, everybody’s politically correct,” Trump said at a rally in Oklahoma. “Our country’s going to Hell with being politically correct.”

In Wilmington, North Carolina, Trump issued a winking endorsement of violence against his opponent, Hillary Clinton, who, he said, might go so far as to appoint judges who favor gun-control laws. “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” Trump said. “Although the Second Amendment people—maybe there is, I don’t know.”

More than three years later, Trump has intensified the search into his singular obsession: Hillary Clinton’s e-mails. Details seem to emerge almost hourly about the extent of his corruption and subterfuge. On Monday, the Times reported that Trump behaved with the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, much as he had with the Ukrainian leader, pressing Morrison in a recent telephone call to assist Attorney General William Barr and the Justice Department in an attempt to undermine the findings of the Mueller report. The Washington Post then added to the miserable picture, reporting that Barr had held private meetings overseas with various foreign-intelligence officials to get them to investigate and ultimately help to discredit the findings of the C.I.A. and other U.S. intelligence agencies about Russian interference in the last Presidential election.

The onset of an impeachment inquiry in the House of Representatives—an initiative that is gathering increasing public support during an election season—is sure to elicit more, and increasingly lurid, threats of retribution from the President. As a result, anxiety throughout the federal government has deepened. “This is a time of real fear inside the State Department,” Burns, a former Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, told me. Diplomats throughout the foreign service became particularly concerned when, in May, the Administration recalled the Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch. Widely considered a deeply knowledgeable, experienced, and nonpartisan diplomat, Yovanovitch had wound up on the wrong side of the Trump circle, including Rudolph Giuliani and Donald Trump, Jr., who referred to her on Twitter as a “joker.” According to the government account of his call with the Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump said ominously that Yovanovitch was “going to go through some things.”

Burns, who is now an informal and unpaid adviser to Joe Biden on foreign-policy issues, told me that Trump’s disregard of democratic norms has reached such a point of crisis that “the floodgates are now going to open, and people inside the White House and the federal government may now come forward to the inspector generals inside the system. This President has overturned much of what has made us great. And that, I think, is appalling to career people.”

Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut, told me that the Administration is propagating a long-held conspiracy theory to justify its behavior. “My understanding is that Trump, Giuliani, and others in the Administration believe that there is a deep-state conspiracy in the State Department against the President and that Masha Yovanovitch was part of this.” Her recall from Kiev, he said, “was a consequence of that conspiracy theory.”

The Deep State conspiracy theory is hardly confined to the West Wing, Murphy went on: “I hear this, too, from my Republican Senate colleagues. There is a belief that there is a group in every corner of the government that is out to get Trump. There really are morally centered people who find him deeply distasteful, and it is required of them to raise questions of corruption if they see it. The Trump Administration sees that as a conspiracy.”

Murphy is hardly revealing a deeply held Republican secret. On Fox News, Stephen Miller, Trump’s senior policy adviser, told Chris Wallace that the whistle-blower was “a deep-state operative, pure and simple.” The whistle-blower’s report, he added, was little more than a “seven-page Nancy Drew novel.”

Wallace pushed back against these talking points, calling Miller’s answers “obfuscation.” Then Wallace played a video of Joseph Maguire, the acting director of National Intelligence, testifying before the House Intelligence Committee last week that the whistle-blower and the inspector general who brought the report forward had acted “by the book and followed the law.”

Among the most pressing questions being discussed now in Washington is how long Republican members of Congress and former White House officials will continue to show fealty to Trump. “I am still stunned that Republicans are circling the wagons in the way that they are,” Murphy said. “They may just decide to ride this out. It may be that they are so entwined around the President, they are so stuck to him with Super Glue, that they can never come unbound.”

The testimony of the whistle-blower could be a dramatic chapter in this unfolding drama. But who else might come forward to testify? One person might be Yovanovitch, who has so far steered clear of speaking publicly about her dismal, and deeply unjust, fate at the hands of the Administration. Others might include Kurt Volker, who just resigned his post as special representative for Ukraine; lawyers in the White House counsel’s office; and other high-ranking officials—including former Cabinet secretaries, national-security advisers, and chiefs of staff—who may finally see no point in reserving their soured descriptions of Trump for deep-background sessions with reporters and authors. They may soon decide it is time to speak in their own names, for the sake of history, decency, and their reputations. And finally: What level of perfidy in the White House, what permutation of public opinion, will it take before Mitch McConnell decides he can no longer continue his cynical marriage to Trump?

It can be assumed that the President will go on using the weapons he learned at the feet of Roy Cohn: constant attack, ruthless threats, the shameless propagation of conspiracy theories. John Dean, whose testimony helped to tip the scales against Richard Nixon in the Watergate affair, told me that the character of Donald Trump insures that this story could get far uglier than it already is.

“Even Nixon would be offended by this effort to use foreign assistance for a very personal, political reason, which is a very corrupting undertaking,” Dean said. “I don’t think Trump has any morals or shame. He will do anything to get reëlected before. . . . It’s just the way Trump thinks. He doesn’t care. He will destroy anybody. I find him a deeply troubling character. When he first went in, I worried that his ignorance would get us in trouble. Now it’s his disposition that I find most troubling of all.”

#president donald trump #trump administration #trump scandals #trumpism #donald trump #potus45 #impeachthemf #impeachment inquiry now #impeach trump #impeachtrump #impeach him #impeach45 #impeachnow #impeach barr #need to impeach #trump news

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realselfblog · 5 years

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Isn’t It Eyeconic? Vision Care in the Evolving Health Care Ecosystem

The vision/optical industry is one piece of the health/care ecosystem, but the segment has not been as directly impacted by patients’ new consumer muscles until just about now.

It feels like the vision industry is at an inflection point at this moment, I intuited during yesterday’s convening of Decoding the Consumer: The new science of customer behavior, the theme of the 13th annual global leadership summit hosted by Vision Monday, a program of Jobson Medical Information which is part of the WebMD family.

I was grateful to have an opportunity to share my views with attendees on the vision patient as health consumer through the health economic lens.

Marc Ferrara, CEO Information Services with Jobson, introduced the meeting with some context. The topic, “decoding the consumer,” was chosen as that vision patient, now consumer, has growing control over their experience – as they seek services for vision care and shop for products (lenses, eyewear, and supplies).

This is impacting optical retailers, from the corporate giants to the still-large presence of Mom-and-Pop brick-and-mortar storefronts in shopping strips, mega-malls, and even practitioners’ homes in exurban and rural geographies.

There’s a new data continuum with a shift in the relationship between the deliverers of services and their buyers. That data powers new relationships and programs, Marc explained.

He shared this image from Cracked Labs which illustrates the many data sources beyond the legacy health care claim that stakeholders can access and, if used for good, can benefit patient care and health outcomes.

Marc then presented an intriguing, if disturbing (to me), bar chart of “the future value of your data.” Globally, that calculated to a value of $2.36 per average internet user per month in 2025, $3.18 for the European citizen, and a whopping $9.82 for Americans. There are reasons underneath this value-calculation I’ll address in another post: top-line for me is Americans’ lack of comprehensive data privacy protection and lack of opt-in to data collection in everyday life (addressed in the concluding Hot Points, below).

In addition to the “data is the new oil” mantra, Marc noted the growth of omnichannel in retail that has begun to re-shape the consumer-facing optical industry. Over one-half of 213 retail chains listed in Internet Retailers top 1000 offered “buy online, pick up in store” fulfillment in 2018. Walmart, in particular, had a huge uptick in this during the 2018 holiday shopping season.

Marge Axelrad of Jobson then set out the agenda for the day, asking one of the day’s big questions, “Can experience and data co-exist?” She said, “of course it can,” as the day’s content proved out.

”We’re a little bit value and a little bit luxury” these days, Marge observed.

“Data and tech can re-define new experiences,” she said. We’re relying on technology to help us learn about what best works for consumer experience. And that’s true for health care as well as generic retail, Marge asserted, introducing Deborah Weinswig who is CEO and Founder, Coresight Research. Deborah spends one-third of her time in China, these days, and gave us the benefit of her learnings from Asia and retail innovation.

Technology is re-shaping physical retail, from Tiffany and Nike to retail pharmacy. Tech integration in the store and via e-commerce is changing the customer experience — and experience is table stakes now to keep the consumer’s loyalty, which is increasingly fleeting.

Here, Deborah’s concept of “boundaryless retail” will be quite relevant for health/care stakeholders, as the consumer can and will seek health everywhere – at home, on the go at grocery stores and workplaces, in their cars…omnichannel beyond (but including) media platforms.

Frictionless retail is also an important paradigm for health care, an industry rife with friction. A huge friction point we identified in our data-for-healthcare-good panel wrapping up the day is surprise medical billing due to patients’ unwitting use of out-of-network physicians and providers. Blockchain is proving to be a sound, effective use-case for keeping provider directories and credentialing up-to-date.

And that will enhance patient/consumer health experience and loyalty.

AI underpins all retail experience now – which is something we’re hearing in healthcare whether at HIMSS, CES, SXSW, ePharma, and other conferences since the start of 2019.

My talk was next up, as I presented the evolving retail health/care ecosystem landscape and the growing role of the patient-as-payor.

Andy Karp of Jobson kicked off the afternoon’s content which focused on data and technology. When Andy spoke of us all being part of the “digital nation” as “digital citizens,” his remarks resonated with me. “We are all part of the digital nation….we pledge allegiance to the digital nation several times a day,” he waxed lyrically. “The only passport we need is a smartphone.”

That means we need a code of data ethics, and for that Andy cited Accenture’s report on Building Digital Trust with 12 principles for using data for good.

A panel on the promises of blockchain technology for health care brainstormed how to make data more transparent, more secure, and more accessible for everyone in the data sphere, with Jill Malandrino of NASDAQ parrying with Janine Grasso of IBM’s blockchain team, and AdventHealth’s CTO Roger Smith bringing his in-depth health system knowledge to the insights.

I believe that the health care industry can learn from IBM’s “journey of a mango from farm to retail,” as Janine described, using blockchain to trace a food chain from farm to fork. Her experience in the early days of blockchain-building across all industries is that 20% is the hard initial work, but 80% of the project is convening the network to agree governance and incentive structures.

IBM is building a Health Utility Network which includes Aetna and Anthem, among other partners, to use for credentialing, claims processing, and other services.

Dr. John Whyte, Chief Medical Officer with WebMD, spoke about how people use the internet for health care search. As a Board Certified Internist, Dr. Whyte speaks as both a front-line health care provider in Washington, DC, as well as through his lens on the inside of WebMD, still among the most-trusted healthcare information portals: one in four U.S. adults uses WebMD each month, and the site is #1 in reach for the top 50 diagnosed conditions, he noted.

It’s also the #1 health site for eye glass wearers 25-54 years old. Over 20 million info seekers on WebMD had an eye exam in the past twelve months. Top search terms for vision/optical information were for dry eye (39%, and weighted toward women seeking this answer), astigmatism (34%), myopia (29%) and floaters/flashes (24%).

People have a lot of curiosity about eyes, John observed — what does an eye color say about one’s health? How can I banish bags from my eyes? What causes eye pain? The questions are many and varied and curious.

No health conference is well-curated in 2019 without some discussion on the growing role of voice tech, and Dave Bovenschulte, VP Strategy with Klick Health, and Justine Santa Cruz, SVP with Satisfi Labs, brought their deep knowledge to the topic. Their remarks informed our last panel session on turning data wealth into patient health.

Amy Heymans (Cueva), founder and leader of Mad*Pow (one of my own go-to health/tech designers) spoke on design for health care, patient engagement and behavior change; and John Ryan, General Manager of UnitedHealthcare Vision spoke of his organization’s strategic use of data in patient care programs for vision health.

Our end-of-day panel featured Dr. Whyte and me synthesizing the findings of the day on how health care and, especially, the vision/optical industry, can leverage data to benefit patient care and health. The elephant in the room all day, I felt and said, was privacy — or lack thereof. While Europeans in the room — remembering two of the major sponsors of the meeting were Essilor (based in France) and Luxxotica (based in Italy) — are covered by the GDPR for privacy of personal data, Americans are barely covered by a patchwork privacy quilt of HIPAA, GINA, COPPA (for children online), and other bits of policy. But the non-traditional data bytes (detailed in the Cracked Labs graphic above) that industry, and especially retail at large, are mashing up aren’t usually covered by HIPAA, unless they reside in HIPAA-covered entities’ information systems.

Our group-of-seven crowdsourced the importance of trust, transparency, and data stewardship to ensure that the patient-as-health-consumer and, ultimately citizen (in my own view) benefit from sharing data. Without these values and an ethical data framework, people won’t fully engage in health care…to the detriment of individual and public health.

Health Populi’s Hot Points: As experience and service become mantras in health care @ retail, it’s useful to call out a recent announcement from VSP, among the largest eyecare insurance providers.

You know about CVS buying Aetna late last year, bringing together the pharmacy-cum-healthcare services operation with a health insurance plan.

Now consider a vision/optical insurance plan entering the retailing side of the business. This is the news coming from VSP, one of the largest providers of vision insurance covering 88 million members, launching its retail optometry business cleverly named Eyeconic.

In their online story, they tout the tagline, “Actual Experts. Actual Humans.”

Check out the lower right portion of the website snippet: “We’ve got an eye for each of yours…The Doctor Connection.” A key message of Eyeconic is their value proposition of connecting you, the patient-consumer, with a real-living doctor, not a chatbot, an app, or virtual human.

As I reflected on Eyeconic and what it means for the vision consumer, I told the group about Dr. Eric Topol’s latest book, Deep Medicine (reviewed here in Health Populi). The tag line of the book is how AI can help humanize health care.

The message here that Eyeconic has adopted meshes with Dr. Topol’s view that AI is key to helping humanize health care — but to complement and enhance the provider’s ability to spend quality time in partnership with patients.

The post Isn’t It Eyeconic? Vision Care in the Evolving Health Care Ecosystem appeared first on HealthPopuli.com.

Isn’t It Eyeconic? Vision Care in the Evolving Health Care Ecosystem posted first on http://dentistfortworth.blogspot.com

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maxihealth · 5 years