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Editor: Ben W. Glass
Profession: Attorney at Law

Category: Looking Outside the Box

The Washington Post has a good article in this week's health column about the surge in "Minute Clinics." These are little health care clinics popping up in shopping malls, drugstores, etc.

Their pitch: If if ain't serious, come to us--it's a lot quicker and cheaper.

As you might imagine, some in the medical community are up in arms arguing, basically, "how dare they offer a service that actually gets patients in and out in 20 minutes!"

According to the Post, an editorial in the American Medical Association complained:

"Convenience is not enough," the AMA lamented in a recent editorial. Comparing the mini-clinic phenomenon to kudzu -- the tree-strangling vine rampant in the South -- the AMA complained these new services are spreading too far, too fast. In a policy statement issued this fall, the AAP "opposes retail-based clinics as an appropriate source of medical care for infants, children, and adolescents and strongly discourages their use."

It's so typical of a business, isn't it. Instead of figuring out how to give patients what they want (like not having to wait 90 minutes for an APPOINTMENT that has been pre-scheduled,) those established businesses complain about the upstarts, including planting articles about how "unsafe" this arrangement is.

Far better to figure out how to give clients/patients/customers what they want.. what bugs them about the way you do business? What keeps them up at night. Figure that out and you won't need to be whining when someone else tries to come up with a better mousetrap.