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There’s an annual $1.5 trillion in revenues for the legacy healthcare system at stake by 2025, at risk of transferring to new entrants keen to please consumers, streamline physician practices, and provide new-new health insurance plans. A team from PwC has characterized this challenge in their strategy+business article, The Coming $1.5 Trillion Shift in Healthcare.

Based on their survey of healthcare industry stakeholders and analyzing their economic model, the PwC team developed three scenarios about the 2025 healthcare market in the U.S. These are supply-driven, demand-driven, and equilibrium. The exhibit details each of these possible futures across various industry stakeholder groups – payors, integrated delivery systems, doctors, health systems, Pharma, retailers, data analytics firms, consumer goods, and other new entrants keen to serve the morphing healthcare market.

PwC’s forecast hedges this 3-part bet by predicting the equilibrium scenario will come to pass, “in which elements of both the supply-driven and demand-driven scenarios coexist in a state of dynamic  tension.”

Health Popului’s Hot Points:  I’m in New York City and had the pleasure of visiting one of healthcare’s new entrants that falls into the retail/doctor/provider segment: One Medical. I visited the company’s location at Columbus Circle, which is where a close friend of mine considers her medical home. She and her husband are covered through her employer under a high-deductible health plan, and so they shopped around the Upper West Side for a primary care practice having been dissatisfied with long waits in the office of their previous provider, lackluster service, and nothing-special diagnostic skills.

imageIn its place, they found this new-new practice setting: one walks into a foyer that feels more like an interior design firm or warm business office setting than a sterile and nondescript doctor’s office. Wood flooring, a fireplace, personalized art in exam rooms, and a warm welcome from the office manager at the front desk strikes a new-and-improved note with a patient who here feels like a valued patron.

I learned that the company will launch a practice at Google’s NYC office, and that the Park Slope location in Brooklyn is now providing pediatrics as well as adult care.

This is an example of PwC’s demand-driven scenario, capitalizing on patients’ growing consumer muscles and choices and the opportunity to embody the best practices in retail. The most successful new entrants will set a new bar not just for retail health, but for health/care everywhere.