The rise and rise of subscription health care
Subscription health care, where individuals or companies pay for access to a set of healthcare services, is set to explode. And it works both in Europe and Emerging Markets.
Falck has over 1m subscribers to its family subscription service in Latin America with subscribers paying to get access to primary care and other services as needed. In India, Aetna now has 450,000 middle class individuals signed up to its Indian Health Organisation offering discounted prices on a range of primary services. (Healthcare Nova subscribers can read our interview with the IHO chief here.)
But these services are also growing fast in Europe. Falck, for instance, works for 300,000 employees in Scandinavia, helping them to best use the local NHS and also to access services which are increasingly unavailable through public payors, such as physiotherapy and psychoanalysis.
Many hundreds of thousands of elderly Israelis subscribe to services which supplement what is offered by Israel’s excellent public healthcare system. The largest player in this market is Natali which was bought 18 months ago by Chinese group Sanpower, which now claims 1m subscribers in China.
There is much to like about the subscription model. For a small monthly fee, it enables consumers to access specific health care services economically. For the operator it is a cashflow positive model which enables the mass recruitment of new customers and patients. And it is easy to direct market the service to target markets.
We will be tracking the emergence of subscription services in both Healthcare Europa and Healthcare Nova and we focus on the area at Healthcare Business International 2017. Both Jan F Steenhard, the CEO of Falck Healthcare and Nimrod Altman, the CEO of Natali, are speaking at Healthcare Business International 2017 about the model. Join us.
We would welcome your thoughts on this story. Email your views to Max Hotopf or call 0207 183 3779.