Air Travel and Health Care

Somehow I missed this post from @ePatientDave late last week (I’ll blame it on the visit from @zorg20, @jknl and the rest of their Dutch delegation, which was excellent but left my inbox overflowing. That and lots of high school basketball games.)

Anyway, enough blame shifting. Dave embedded this great video, which is only 20 days old as of this writing, but already has amassed nearly 40,000 views.

Lots of people have made the connection between air travel and health care from the safety perspective, noting that with 100,000 people dying each year because of medical errors, that’s like a fully loaded 747 crashing every day of the year. Making a similar argument from the patient service/customer service perspective is brilliant.

Thanks to Dave for highlighting this, and to my colleague Jim for bringing it to my attention.

First-Class NWA Experience

I had an interesting experience in my 6:15 a.m. flight on Northwest Airlines (NWA) from Pittsburgh to MSP today. When I had awakened at 6:20 yesterday (without the alarm) after having arrived in Pittsburgh just before midnight (and not getting to sleep until 2:30 because of some remaining work to do, such as this blog post), I hurriedly logged on and checked in for my flight because it was within the 24-hour window, and I knew that frequent-flyer upgrades on NWA are offered in part on a first-come, first-served basis within a given Elite (Platinum, Gold, Silver) category. (How’s that for a run-on sentence?)

It seems I wouldn’t have had to do that, as you’ll see in the video below:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iI6vsfTuWN0]

Note to self: Fly at ridiculously early times on Saturdays (at least if you’re not starting at a hub city), and you have a lot better chance of getting a First Class upgrade on Northwest Airlines. Even if you’re only Silver Elite.