Many people tend to think within professional silos. Barbers cut hair. Farmers farm. And, doctors practice medicine.
Why?
I read a Wall Street Journal article about a company in the gym business that’s expanding beyond the gym business into – yep, you got it – healthcare.
It’s just another one of those ventures. There’s a huge crossover between lifestyle and healthcare, between beauty and healthcare.
It’s the same trend expanded from what may have begun in the realm of the “medi-spa”, which was not the invention of physicians, such as plastic surgeons or dermatologists, expanding into a wider range of beauty, but was really unlicensed folks often making compliance mistakes, licensing mistakes, and corporate practice of medicine mistakes when they expanded into what was really medical practice.
But one of the beauties about starting from the perspective of a physician or of a medical group is that the ability to expand beyond a traditional medical practice into a lifestyle practice is far more open to you because of your license.
The “medical beauty” and “lifestyle health” fields are going to continue to exist, and they’re going to expand, whether they’re controlled by gym owners, aestheticians, chiropractors, or by physicians.
Over the past few decades, physicians gave up much of the control of traditional medicine and it’s resulted in a hospital-centric “healthcare” system. How’s that working out for you?
Now that technology is removing much of the need for hospitals – the theme of The Impending Death of Hospitals – physicians can gain back much of the lost autonomy. We usually see that in the context of physician-owned ASCs and other outpatient ventures and in physician-led clinically-integrated and financially-integrated ventures.
But at the same time, there are opportunities to push the envelope even further into broader notions of healthcare and lifestyle, whether alone or in collaboration with professionals from other disciplines, some of which traditionally have nothing or very little to do with what you consider “healthcare. ”
There’s a world of opportunity if you’re willing to think beyond the simple bounds of what medical practice is.
