When I was 17 I worked at a McDonald’s. The store was a franchise location.
Franchise models exist in medicine as well as in hamburgers. For example, in the urgent care center market.
But there’s no reason the franchise model won’t work in other facets of the healthcare industry, from hospital-based groups, to office-based specialties, to surgery centers.
On the physician services side, especially in terms of hospital-based services and branded “institutes of excellence” (e.g., sports medicine, cardiac surgery) the model brings some interesting benefits. It allows the franchisor to expand without investing capital in new locations (in fact, the opposite is the case in that the franchisee pays fees and percentages) while the franchisee gets the benefit of a business model, systems, services and brand.
Physician group leaders often mistakenly think that their options for business organization and for expansion are limited to the models traditionally found in medicine. But that’s simply not the case.
