Claiming the Coveted First-of-the-Year Intelligent Design Award for 2007 is HMSA (Hawaii Blue Cross).

And now here is, in the words of the immortal philosopher Paul Harvey, the rest of the story. At a number of conferences in 2006, the Chief Medical Officer of Blue Cross of Minnesota gave what was arguably the best-ever disease management presentation by a Blue Cross executive. That flattery from me pales by comparison to the flattery offered by HMSA, which liked it so much that they decided to report the exact same analysis for their own customers.

When I say "they decided to report the exact same analysis for their own customers," I don't mean the exact same type of analysis. No, when I say "they decided to report the exact same analysis for their own customers," I mean they literally cut-and-pasted the Minnesota slides into the reports for (at least) one of their own customers as one of the analyses done specifically for that customer on that customer's own population. In any other field, if one company plagiarizes data from another company and represents it as having been created by themselves specifically for a customer, it would be considered fraud. However, in disease management, it's considered . . . hmmm . . . I guess . . . fraud.

Each of these awards usually carries a lesson. The lesson here is, don't mess with the Operating Engineers Local 3. Those guys are quite sharp and they weren't born yesterday. (Actually they've been around since 1898, making them almost as old as GE.) If you're going report results for them, those results better be based on their own data or they are likely to notice, this award being Exhibit A to that effect.

And so the award of a brand spanking new 2007 Intelligent Design Award goes to HMSA. And they should feel free to copy this analysis too and send it to their customers, though I suspect their competitors will beat them to it.

One more thing: Compare the numbers in the text on the HMSA slide to the graphs. They bear no relationship to each other. They can't even plagiarize correctly.

BLUE CROSS OF MINNESOTA PUBLICLY PRESENTED SLIDES

HMSA SLIDE PRESENTED TO OPERATING ENGINEERS

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