In an effort to improve market share healthcare organizational leaders have been looking to garner new niches in the healthcare market. Savvy healthcare leaders and their organizations have begun to capitalize on the nation's biggest epidemic to come along in years - obesity. One in four Americans, 72 million of us are considered obese with millions more being overweight.
Why shouldn't healthcare organizations get into a multi-billion dollar industry like weight loss? Health spas, weight loss clinics, bariatric surgery, and wellness programs to name a few could offset the woes of poor reimbursement rates for hospitals and healthcare systems. Americans are obsessed with weight loss. A pill, a new diet, a new exercise program, any new hope of getting toned and ripped. With all the false claims and gimmicks on the market who better to advise and direct safe weight loss programs other than acute care facilities.
Staying the course for healthcare organizations will only add more difficulty to the already fiscally constrained status that most facilities endure. For healthcare systems to survive financially doing business as usual or like everyone else will not secure a future. Diversification such as engaging in the weight loss epidemic offers healthcare organizations a chance to stand out. It also provides a means of combating the nation's largest epidemic problem to come along in years, which in the long run if it can be abated will help deter healthcare costs.
So why don't more healthcare organizations capitalize on obesity? What do they have to lose?
1 Comment
Why shouldn't healthcare organizations get into a multi-billion dollar industry like weight loss? Health spas, weight loss clinics, bariatric surgery, and wellness programs to name a few could offset the woes of poor reimbursement rates for hospitals and healthcare systems. Americans are obsessed with weight loss. A pill, a new diet, a new exercise program, any new hope of getting toned and ripped. With all the false claims and gimmicks on the market who better to advise and direct safe weight loss programs other than acute care facilities.
Staying the course for healthcare organizations will only add more difficulty to the already fiscally constrained status that most facilities endure. For healthcare systems to survive financially doing business as usual or like everyone else will not secure a future. Diversification such as engaging in the weight loss epidemic offers healthcare organizations a chance to stand out. It also provides a means of combating the nation's largest epidemic problem to come along in years, which in the long run if it can be abated will help deter healthcare costs.
So why don't more healthcare organizations capitalize on obesity? What do they have to lose?