See how many mistakes, including mistakes of omission, you can find in this article.

If you can’t find any, as apparently Humana can’t, you should sign up for Critical Outcomes Report Analysis certification. One of these days, people outside of DMPC Nation are going to start noticing obvious mistakes in outcomes reporting. When that happens, you want to be a noticer, not a noticee.

As with Viverae, the other 2011 winner of an Intelligent Design Award to date, the irony is that Humana is not being given an award because they don’t measure according to industry standards. They are being given an award because they do measure according to industry standards. That's why the time has come to replace consensus-based industry standards with standards based on actual arithmetic. Math trumps consensus, unless you work at Dunder Mifflin Paper Co. (a division of the Sabre Corporation), and adhere to the immortal words of the great philosopher Michael G. Scott: “Why does the sun rise in the east? Why does 2 + 2 = 4? Because everyone says it does, that’s why.”

We would not be surprised to learn that there is a pony in Humana’s pile. They are quite experienced at care management, are throwing a lot of resources at their chronically ill population, and no doubt have accomplished something. Unfortunately I suspect that they were allocated those resources because of the outcomes they showed. If they were to measure validly, they might lose some funding. So they will probably stick to their current measurement system. In the immortal words of the great philosopher Upton Sinclair: “It is impossible to prove something to someone whose salary depends on believing the opposite.”

Next Intelligent Design Award