How Running a Clinic Differs from A Regular Commercial Store

As of 2018, the healthcare industry in the United States was valued at $1.7 trillion with annual healthcare expenditures surpassing $3.24 trillion. This figure alone helps make the industry very tempting to investors, entrepreneurs, and companies outside of the healthcare system. There are lots of needs and opportunities in this industry, despite the fact that the track record of non-healthcare firms is very poor, more when talking about large companies.

Even though the healthcare sector has more regulations compared to other sectors, this is just but the tip of the iceberg, obviously. You will find that there are subtler and substantive challenges lying below all this. In addition to regulation, the following are some of the peculiarities that challenge entrance and achievement in this sector:

Cottage Industry

The healthcare sector is an industry comprising of various separate enterprises working together to assist in delivering healthcare services to the populace. The ‘cottages’ work like trading partners between themselves and other health care providers like Pure Dentistry to their patients.

You will notice that no single healthcare market is totally integrated with the exception of some nationalized health care systems. Different types of trading partners will be different in terms of the methods used to deliver care, how they get paid, and the people that pay them. The coordination between care trading partners has in the past been done using fax machines and phone calls.

Is it possible for a single solution to fulfil the needs of the whole collection of trading partners? Maybe, in certain cases, and obviously not easily.

Health Care Is Well Organized and Is Delivered as a Community

When is all said and done, it all comes down to this: a patient can only travel so far to get healthcare services. And often, you will find that you will not have to travel very far. The implication here is that trading partners in the healthcare industry are structured within the travelling distances of a group of clients that is larger in rural areas and smaller in urban centres.

The interest of many trading partners only lies in their patients and other trading associates who are in that particular community. Payers, who are in this case the health insurance firms act as the biggest exception here as they normally sell similar products across numerous communities on a national basis.

Healthcare has a communal nature which tends to impact adoption strategies due to the desire to accomplish a minimal adoption level among the target audience—trading partners and/or patients so as to produce and provide value to the clients. For example, the providers’ main interest is to interact with other trading associates and physicians located in that community.

Trading partners in that network who may be located across the state or town will be of no consequence to that clinic or healthcare provider. The reality is that each industry comes with its own set of quirks. Running a clinic is just quirkier than operating your everyday business.