A review of the medical-media picture so far

Just to help put a batch of puzzle-pieces into some coherent arrangement, here is a list of entries related to medical-media firm problems, in chronological order of the experience recounted:

My entry of June 22, “Preliminaries for a Biopsy, 1: My plodding, frustrating route, in the mid-1990s, from staff-editing work toward freelance and, later, medical-media firms,” gave little glimpses of my first crossing-paths with CommonHealth. My applications to Thomas Ferguson Associates in 1992 don’t count; but my interview at Ferguson 2000 (in Little Falls, N.J.) in 1995 does. So does my getting a letter back from a CommonHealth H.R. staffer (at Parsippany, N.J.) in 2000.

My entry of July 5, “Start of a Biopsy (this won’t hurt a bit): My first work at CommonHealth, 2001-03—some more than 10 years ago,” tells of my first and best times with CommonHealth, before and after 9/11; much of this was at MBS/Vox. This period also included some quirks--not quite so bad as placement-agency quirks would get in later years--related to working there through a placement agency, Horizon Graphics, which had seemed so tough to get into in 1994.

My new entry, of July 16, “Sudden end of an idyll: How the best third (2001-03) of my time at CommonHealth met, peculiarly, with a group layoff,” tells how things wound up at MBS/Vox, the division of CommonHealth I was at the most time overall, in 2001-02, 2002-03, and (as can be described briefly later) 2006.

Some future entries, if/as I publish them, will describe stuff from 2004 and 2006. These entries will be shorter, in part because the experiences recounted are simpler.

Then, really showing how things started to get more dicey and troubled with CommonHealth (and actually reflecting the increased trouble for medical-media and the related placement agencies overall), on July 9, there was the entry “Preliminaries for a Biopsy, 3 (or: Anecdotal Evidenz, Anecdote 4): What became of the placement agency “The Gary Laverne Group” (a pseudonym) in 2007? Some health-care-related dealings that were starkly unhealthy for a firm’s workers.” CommonHealth, of course (and as may not surprise some), was the “large medical-media agency” referred to in this entry. This firm was among several other medical-media firms in stiffing “The Gary Laverne Group,” causing it to go under. To give the benefit of the doubt, CommonHealth may not have been the main source of trouble in this matter, in terms of amount of money; it’s possible that distinction belongs to the firm in Berkeley Heights I refer to.

Some broader themes

I have talked about how medical editors are used for their hourly rates to be means to bill the Big Pharma client by the medical-media firm, not really to reward a solid period of work per its measurable aspect of work-effort-supporting-product-value, in this entry of July 9: “What is editing? Part 2 of 2: Is medical editing a blind alley?  [BETA].”

Also, the idea of how a large medical-media firm is “scalable” is remarked on in the (coming) “Sudden end of an idyll.” You would have to see the entry to know what I mean by "scalable."

This all seems to give a lot of the picture of the economics and the power structure of the medical-media firms in relation to the editors. And believe it or not, this is all a prelude to an account of my experience of 2010, where the worst potential inherent in all this form of business came to a rather excruciating head for me, effectively ending my ability to work in this field, or at least at the firm where the 2010 stuff happened. Now whether I say very much on this blog (more than I already have) about the 2010 experience remains to be seen.