FlipSide

That was the reaction here when we received a promotional package from Spheris, a provider of medical transcription technology and services.

The press release was simple: Spheris recently acquired another health information technology company called Vianeta, which makes clinical documentation software based on Extensible Markup Language. Got it. But what we don’t get is the connection between that announcement and the enclosed doll and pins.

If you stretch your mind far enough, you can probably come up with a perfectly innocent and legitimate marketing concept. But folks here immediately recognized the doll as a way to take out their frustrations on unnamed individuals. “Take that!”