A Series on Consumer Health – Part 2: Where it’s fallen short.
From the perspective of Irfan Alam, Founder & CEO of Frontrow Health, a startup whose mission is to unleash consumer health in America.
Last week I wrote about the promise of consumer health. However, the reality is that it has largely fallen short of its true potential. Why? Why are the major consumer health companies trading so low on the stock market, laying off employees, and struggling to turn a profit? The answer may be right in Key & Peele’s hilarious French Restaurant skit…TL;DR: consumers don’t know how to read menus in another language.
After speaking with hundreds of consumers, brands, and medical providers, all roads lead to one challenging truth: consumers are not equipped to take charge of their own health.
In order for consumers to take charge of their health, they must be (1) motivated to, (2) know how to, and (3) be able to.
The second pillar is where consumer health falls short today: we have not invested enough resources to educate or equip consumers on how to make decisions about their own health.
Post-COVID, consumers are (1) more excited than ever to take charge of their health (i.e., I want to lose weight to reduce my risk of heart disease) and similarly, (3) have never had more options to do so (i.e., weight loss supplements, behavioral science apps, fasting aids, and more).
However, are they any more knowledgeable on which weight loss supplements work best? Or what kind of behavioral science-based solutions are actually effective? Or whether fasting aids are even safe?
This confusion creates friction, and frictions causes dropoff – it causes people not to act.
Put differently, traditional healthcare is like sitting down at a restaurant, being handed a menu with no prices, having your meal picked for you, and getting a surprise bill for dinner 3 weeks later.
On the flip-side, consumer-directed healthcare today is a bit better. It’s like sitting down at a restaurant while on vacation, being handed a menu with prices, but the ingredients are written in a foreign language, and sure Jordan Peele has the option to pick his own meal, but he sadly can’t ask his waiter questions about what’s in it.
That’s consumer health today. Yes, people are excited about picking their own meal, but it’s pretty hard to do if you can’t read the menu, or at the least, can’t ask a waiter to translate the menu for you.
Luckily, for healthcare, we have good translators. They’re called medical providers. But, today, they’re nowhere to be found when you’re ready to order. Today, you have to schedule an appointment a month out and (co)pay them to translate some options for you (i.e., is this weight loss aid that I got an Instagram ad for safe or not, especially because of the prescription meds I’m on?).
Without good translators/providers who are readily available to answer questions, consumers will continue to be (rightfully) unsure about whether to trust ads, influencers, or other health content they find online. This will further drive up the cost of acquiring new customers, leading to increased difficulty for consumer health brands to turn a profit and connect their solutions to clinically relevant audiences.
But what if you could hand an eager consumer a menu of options that’ve already been deciphered/pre-vetted by their own provider so they don’t have to guess about what’s uniquely right for them when ordering? And what if they could click a button and ask their provider a question without having to wait a month for that appointment? Oh and maybe throw in a 20% discount off everything on the menu.
That’d be better. That’d be less confusing, and definitely more affordable. That’d be like sitting in the front row of your health. And that’d be exactly what you deserve.
