AlignMap

As he is wont to do, Dr. House asks the right diagnostic question; in this case, the diagnosis is unintentional noncompliance:

Credit Due Department: My friend and colleague, Lord of Leisure, alerted me to this video.

Re Compliance Vs Adherence Vs Concordance, …

I have another instance to offer that demonstrates the significance of re-naming the same phenomenon.

In the middle of his career, contract disputes led to Prince changing his stage name¹ from “Prince” to the unpronounceable symbol shown under the middle picture in the above graphic. The press circumvented the symbol by referring to “The Artist formerly known as Prince.” The performer has since returned to the hardly prosaic “Prince” appellation although sardonic sorts will still, on occasion, refer to him as “The artist formerly known as ‘the artist formerly known as Prince.’”

Note the transformations wrought by the shifts in names.

1. For the record, Prince’s given, non-stage name is Prince Rogers Nelson↩

Patient Compliance Plaque #1 Available For Pre-Order

The Original Patient Compliance Commemorative Plaque

Having decided that if I can’t eliminate schlock from the Patient Compliance marketplace by pointing out errors, misleading ambiguities, and clinical trials clearly organized for marketing rather than research, I may as well compete with it, AlignMap, in association with Heck OF A Guy, my personal blog,¹ has commissioned a series of artistic memorializations of my own walker exploits in the service of Patient Compliance, achievements initially reported in this blog at Contemporary Compliance Case Study Follow-up and The Personal Patient Compliance Project Update.²

Pictured atop this post is the first offering, the descriptively entitled Triumph Of Patient Compliance: A Tribute To The Performance Of The Unauthorized Alvin Ailey-Inspired Choreographic Sequence Adapted For Adherence To Post-Hip Pinning Rehabilitative Instructions For Avoidance Of Weight-Bearing On Right Leg With Physician Prescribed Accompaniment By Assistive Walking Device, which captures the courage, aesthetic integrity, and athletic elegance of this example of dynamic adherence to treatment in a compelling charcoal on marble etching.

The Only Authentic Patient Compliance Commemorative Plaque

To protect buyers from product devaluation secondary to fakes and cheap knockoffs polluting the market, these limited edition pieces, each signed, dated, and numbered, are distributed exclusively through the AlignMap/Heck of a Guy Mercantile and Schwag Emporium.

Further, each plaque is accompanied by a Certificate Of Authenticity establishing that item’s provenance and the stipulation that the artists, designers, subjects, and sellers have no connection to known terrorists, foreign or domestic.

To assist buyers in demonstrating their fiscal savvy to spouses and neighbors and provide documentation for those so imbued with altruism that they purchase a plaque with the intention of donating it to charity, the Certificate of authenticity also alludes, with an ambiguity that itself approaches artistry, to a True Market⁴ valuation at least sixteen times higher than the incredibly low price actually charged in this special introductory offer.⁵

Pre-ordering The Patient Compliance Commemorative Plaque

The production run of these limited edition pieces will be completed soon, at which time these items will be offered to the general public. Prior to the shipment’s arrival at our retail outlet, however, Heck Of A Guy and AlignMap readers have the exclusive opportunity to pre-order this especially significant First Edition Of The First Patient Compliance Commemorative Plaque.

Viewers can pre-order a maximum of five plaques at the opening list cost – a price guaranteed regardless of the spiking that is all but inevitable as demand for these highly desirable collectibles drives up the frenzied bidding in the secondary markets.

Further, only pre-order customers can reserve the lower numbered – and thus far more prestigious, and obviously more valuable – imprints from this numbered set.

Investing In Family Values

Imagine the delight your family will experience when these investment-grade emblems of heroic patient compliance grace your home, destined to become family heirlooms so treasured by your children that, following your death or institutionalization – whichever comes first, fights will break out and irreparable psychological damage will be done as those covetous offspring battle each other for the chance to once again cash in on your efforts by selling the complete set at an outrageous mark-up on eBay.

Footnotes

1. The Heck OF A Guy blog features song, dance, and snappy chatter plus notes on prose, poesy, love, lust, life, and beyond↩
2. A more complete account of the original injury and subsequent hip-pinning, which led to the walker-dependent rehabilitation prescription as well as my own compliance efforts can be found at these posts in my personal blog:
   Sick Call II
   Sick Call III
   Pimp My Assistive Device
   Walkernastics
   Awaiting Weight-bearing – Still

   ↩

3. We were, as readers may well be, surprised and appalled to discover that commemorative items sold by our competitors don’t carry the same guarantee that profits from their sales won’t be used by terrorists to buy weapons and toxic agents with which to attack the country we love, especially since their products are, ironically, purchased in disproportionate numbers by the most patriotic citizens. We certainly acknowledge, however, that customers have the right and the freedom to purchase the kind of items we sell from anyone they like – as long as they don’t mind possibly helping the terrorists win and being enslaved to godless, non-English speaking foreigners.↩
4. The True Market is a self-contained, fully regulated marketplace, which, by virtue of its residing exclusively on the hard drive of the laptop which produces the AlignMap Blog and, in one of those cosmically serendipitous coincidences, rigorously micromanaged by the Alignmap Blog, is uncontaminated by other exchanges and markets↩
5. While including such a document with commemorative items is not unusual, the AlignMap/Heck Of A Guy Patient Compliance Commemorative Plaque #1 package goes beyond the industry standard by adding a second Letter of Attestation, issued by the Independent & Prestigious AlignMap/Heck Of A Guy Bureau of Attestation and printed in an typeface with no affiliation to that used in the Certificate Of Authenticity, attesting to the certification and authentication of the Certificate Of Authenticity. The joint panel of experts from AlignMap and Heck of a Guy are confident that, had they actually spent hundreds of hours researching the tax codes, pertinent statutes, and appropriate rules and regulations, they would find no specific prohibition to the plaque purchaser-donor challenged by the IRS to respond by contemptuously exhibiting before the Federal agents the referenced Certificate Of Authenticity and the Letter of Attestation, both of which are impressively replete with colorful seals, all manner of embellishments, a variety of adornments, and indecipherable quasi-legalistic terminology (especially “herewith,” “forthwith,” “pursuant to,” “once upon a time,” and “when pigs fly”) set on paper of distinguished appearance and high rag content.↩

RoboCop As Healthcare Compliance Poster Boy

There are, of course, alternatives to the patient-centric, mutually cooperative sort of healthcare compliance campaigns referenced in Proposed Action Plan For Enhancement Of Medication Adherence A Must Read

The RoboCop Compliance Program, based on the percepts electronically endowed to the hemi-mechanical hero who was the prototype for the law enforcement robots featured in the RoboCop movies, is simplicity itself:

1. RoboCop (Dr. RoboCop to you) presents the healthcare instructions
2. RoboCop enhances compliance with his trademark line, which also serves as the Program’s slogan (Click to hear RoboCop Treatment Adherence Slogan)

   [audio:complyx.mp3]

The RoboCop Incentive System
Because the RoboCop Program is, after all, a complete system, it offers carrots as well as threatening with sticks. Compliant patients (AKA survivors) earn vouchers to dance to the Silver Bullet’s disco hit based on the same RoboCop quote.