In the battle for health care market share, the small things can make the biggest difference

The front desk person who took my call for a doctor’s appointment probably had no idea that she was a crucial brand touchpoint for the clinic owned by Big Health System A, and that her response to my question was about as bad as could be.

She was actually very kind for the entire phone call, which was brief. I told her I was looking for a primary care doctor. Then I asked if her clinic had evening or weekend hours. “No,” she replied. “We’re a normal doctor’s office.”

Thud. In this era of the customer, a normal doctor’s office wins last place. Especially when Big Health System B had a clinic in my neighborhood, with evenings hours twice a week and every second Saturday.

I’m not talking about a convenience care clinic. No, Big Health System B was a medical home, with internists and family practice doctors (as opposed to “mid-level providers” found at most convenient care centers).

It was no contest. In the battle for my business, the “normal doctor’s office” struck out. It was a complete brand breakdown on every front.

·      Their hours were for the convenience of their staff.

·      Their staff taking calls clearly hadn’t been well trained in what to convey about their clinic.

·      Oh, and it was five months before I could get a scheduled appointment. Yes, five months.

A “normal doctor’s office” is where you go and sit around in a room full of sick people waiting for the doctor to see you 45 minutes after your scheduled appointment time. You take the time off work to accommodate their schedule. In other words, the normal doctor’s office is a dinosaur.

In business schools the world over, marketing as a discipline was constructed around the 4 P’s of Product, Price, Placement into the market (i.e. sales and distribution) and promotion. Today, every one of those has been stood on its head in health care and other sectors.

·      What were once products are now services, and they’re priced on a subscription basis. You buy music as a subscription on Spotify. Uber, Lyft, Amazon Audible books, movie clubs. Customers are more often looking for outcomes than ownership.

·      Sales and distribution take place on the customer’s laptop or mobile device. And that includes doctor visits. Health care is no longer about delivering at the “point of care.” It’s on the customer’s terms, at the point of need. That is, through e-visits, home care, workplace-based clinic, or at the local convenient care center.

·      You need lab work? You don’t have to visit the normal doctor and wait. Go to WebMD, click the link to Quest Diagnostics, get an instant doctor’s order to have your blood drawn at the collection center in Safeway.

Normal doesn’t cut it anymore, anywhere. The customer is in charge. The customer has never been better armed with information and options. Expectations for medical service have been spiked by Nordstrom and Fidelity and Apple.

Health care is one of the last industries to get on board with this. In part, it’s because there’s virtually no competition from Japan and Korea and Taiwan. Competing with the Japanese and Germans and Taiwanese in high tech is where I got most of my business education.

Then again, North Mexican surgery centers are pulling in growing numbers of Americans for lower cost and high quality surgeries—covered increasingly by U.S. insurers. Between those, and all the other options for getting care on the customer’s terms, that noise you hear from the normal doctor’s office will be the last roar of the dinosaur.