‘A Whole New Way To See The Doctor’
23rd January 2011
“To support our practice, we ask patients to pay a low annual membership fee of $199.” For this you can “schedule your appointments online,” “see your doctor on time,” and “email your doctor with questions.”
How many other professional service businesses are there where, on top of the whatever fee the customers pay for the service, the customer has to pay an extra annual fee for the privilege of e-mailing the professional or of having the professional show up on time for meetings? In most other fields, these are the sort of things that are basic courtesy and communication, not something you have to pay extra for. If a college professor asked students to pay him extra to guarantee that he showed up for class on time, or if a lawyer tried to charge extra for communicating with her by email rather than phone or in person, the students or clients would probably think there was something strange going on. But with health care, the baseline customer experience is often so poor that the alternative sounds attractive.