Uncertainty doesn’t fit neatly into a frictionless onboarding flow designed by someone whose previous expertise was ecommerce customer retention.
There’s a very specific type of healthcare founder emerging right now – often a “30 under 30” rich lister with a background in ecommerce or marketing who is pro-peptides, testosterone and “optimisation medicine” and has decided healthcare is fundamentally a UX problem.
And to be fair, some of the criticism is right.
Healthcare is often clunky. We trad-clinicians do have a long way to go to meet modern consumers with a modern product.
But what these founders often fail to understand is that not every friction point exists because doctors are stupid or healthcare is outdated.
Sometimes we have necessary friction – because medicine is complicated and humans are complicated.
Let’s look at fatigue. GPs see fatigue every single day. And it’s easy to say “your GP doesn’t understand you – they told you that everything was normal but YOU KNOW IT’S NOT”.
But what that ignores is often that clinician looked at them in the context of them being the exhausted parent, the shift worker, the guy drinking too much. The patient with depression. The patient with sleep apnoea. The patient trapped in a horrible relationship. The person slowly burning themselves into the ground.
And the uncomfortable reality is that these problems won’t be solved with a peptide or an injection under the skin. All the testogel in the world won’t fix sleep apnoea but it is MUCH easier to extract money from consumers if you convince them it can.
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“Your life is complex and we need to carefully work through this over time” is a terrible conversion funnel. And that conversation genuinely leaves people feeling like there has to be something else.
“Optimise your vitality”, sells far better.
The easy thing in medicine has always been giving people a neat narrative and a treatment. Antibiotics for viral infections. Opioids for chronic pain.
Now increasingly we see frictionless journeys selling peptides and optimisation medicine for the broad discomfort of modern life.
The hard part is longitudinal care, context and uncertainty. Which is what we trad-wives of medicine have been dealing out for years.
And yes – our whole information sharing and communication approach needs improvement. Yes – we should be more inclusive of consumers when sharing data and decision making. Yes – we need to do better.
But is streamlining hormone solutions and muscle repairs B2C in discreet packaging the solution? No.
Unfortunately, uncertainty doesn’t fit neatly into a frictionless onboarding flow designed by someone whose previous expertise was ecommerce customer retention.
Dr Max Mollenkopf is a GP and practice owner in Newcastle, NSW.
This article was first published on Dr Mollenkopf’s LinkedIn feed. Read the original here.
