I listened to a very interesting podcast called “The Soul of Enterprise.” It’s a business podcast mostly aimed at accountants, but it applies to other professional service providers as well.
The hosts were talking about the notion of “yield management,” the concept that airlines use to maximize the profitability from pricing the seats on a plane, and of course, on how they segment those seats into classes, thus segmenting the market.
In other words, they carefully segment each flight into so many first-class seats, so many “premium” coach seats or whatever they call them on the airline, and so many regular coach seats including those dreaded ones back by the lavatory at the tail of the plane.
Airlines have figured out that there are different customers who are flying for different reasons and at different price points. They’ve also figured out that some are willing to travel in a slightly different style. It’s not that the people who fly first class get from Dallas to Chicago any faster, and it’s not the case that anyone flying from Dallas to Chicago is any safer as a result of paying more money to fly first class as opposed to paying bottom dollar fares to sit next to the lavatory in the back of the plane.
And yes, there’s an analogy here to healthcare.
I’m not about to suggest that any of you cut back on the quality of the medical service that’s being delivered to patients any more than an airline cuts back on safety when no one is seated in first class.
Instead, I suggest that you think about how the pricing model, that is, the value exchange model, on an airplane can be instructive in terms of how you provide different tiers of service to your patients.
A similar concept is certainly applicable to office practice physicians. There’s the whole notion in internal medicine and family practice of concierge medicine, which is a complete transfer of the notion of first-class care, meaning first-class customer care, first-class human touches, as opposed to, for example, a clinic setting in which the medical care is just as good, but the surroundings in which it’s presented differs wildly.
Different patients have different expectations in terms of how soon they will be seen. Different patients have different expectations about how they’re treated. Are they shown to a separate waiting room or are they just plopped in with everyone else? And so on.
Different patients would, and do, attach different price points to the level of service and interaction.
It’s also true that payor considerations screw up a lot of this, but certainly not all of this. And, for many of you who are escaping an insurance model, it doesn’t hinder your development of a segmented care “cabin” but feeds right into it.
Think about the way business models in other industries segment customers by the level of service those customers want, and, are willing to pay for. Think about how those or similar concepts can be applied by you.
