According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), about one in five Medicare patients discharged from a hospital is readmitted within 30 days. In an effort to change this, in 2009, the CMS began publicly reporting hospital readmission rates for certain conditions, and the Affordable Care Act contains multiple payment reforms intended to promote hospital efforts to address and prevent adverse events after discharge. Chief among these are financial penalties for hospitals with above-average readmission rates for certain illnesses.

Of late, I've found myself staring into a few large contradictions that impact my professional world and thinking about the opposing forces they represent.

A little over a year-and-a-half ago, I wrote a column for Marketing:Health focusing on the emergence of technology-aided content personalization. It was one of my most popular essays. People either strongly agreed or disagreed with the notion that technologies that allow for the automatic delivery of personalized health information to consumers could pose a threat to marketers.

Clinical Development and Product Marketing teams within pharmaceutical companies seem so distant from one another sometimes it's hard to recognize that they are working for the same company.

It will come as no surprise that I spend the majority of my time with creative types. That's mostly because it's my job, but also because they're a ton of fun. (Which may be why it's my job...) We share a love of ideas and a fascination for where ideas come from and the process of realizing them.

With the everyday pressures of meetings, deadlines, budget management, sales forecasts and the business of pharmaceutical marketing, it's easy to forget that it all boils down to one very simple thing: at this exact moment in time, millions of patients are living with and managing a whole variety of conditions. And the one thing they all have in common: some type of relationship with a healthcare professional. A huge opportunity exists for pharmaceutical marketers to enhance patient/HCP dialogue, to deliver better, more compassionate care for patients, which positively impacts both NRx and TRx for brands.