By Leslie Small
In the wake of a scandal
surrounding the news that Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina's CEO,
Patrick Conway, M.D., was arrested in a drunken driving incident back in June,
the insurer has officially called off its planned "strategic affiliation"
with Cambia Health Solutions.
Experts tell AIS Health
that the whole saga offers powerful lessons for other organizations about how
not to handle a tricky public relations situation.
One major problem is the
fact that members of the North Carolina Blues plan's board of directors opted
to keep Conway's arrest under wraps when he reported it to them, says Lawrence
J. Parnell, an associate professor of strategic public relations at George
Washington University.
Conway told The Wall
Street Journal in a September interview that when he informed the Blues
insurer's board of the incident, lawyers recommended that he "not disclose
anything publicly until the legal process was completed."
According to Parnell, the
North Carolina Blues plan should have notified regulators and the public of the
incident when it happened.
"When they didn't do
that and allegedly advised him to not talk about it, it smacks of trying to
cover something up," he says. "And in almost every case, the efforts
to clean up or cover up something are as bad — if not worse — than the initial
incident that you’re dealing with."
Indeed, for organizations
in general, "the longer they wait to release the information, the harder
it is to understand why they did it," says James Lukaszewski, a corporate
executive consultant.
From Health Plan Weekly
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