As I mentioned in my previous column (December 2010), my company (Holistic Primary Care-News for Health & Healing) recently conducted a survey of roughly 2000 primary care doctors nationwide to learn more about how practitioners—especially mainstream MDs—interface with the supplement and natural products industries.
 
The 52-question study told us a lot about what’s going on in the trenches of clinical practice these days. Suffice it to say, there are a lot of unhappy doctors out there, and they’re looking for help—in improving their patient care, and in surviving the economic forces conspiring against them.
 
If you still harbor the belief that an MD degree is a ticket to easy street, and that doctors are exploiting the American public, you’d better open your eyes—and read something else besides insurance company media blitzes. What our survey respondents—the vast majority of whom are conventionally trained MDs—are telling us is that they’re having a rough go of it.
 
But as the ancient Chinese sages stated, in crisis is found opportunity. I believe the crisis today’s doctors are facing spells great opportunity for natural products companies that can bring forward real, trustworthy, meaningful solutions.
 
Nearly 20% of our respondents—that’s 1 in 5 of a representative sample of American primary care doctors—is contemplating making a major change in his/her practice situation in the next year or two. That’s HUGE! Many are considering a shift out of insurance and into direct-pay non-insurance practice or a “membership” or “concierge” practice model (i.e., the MDVIP approach). Others are thinking about opening up medical spas or fitness centers, to try and serve the growing demand for truly health-focused healthcare.
 
But some of them are thinking about bailing out of medicine altogether, selling their practices to large hospital networks, or taking corporate jobs as salaried physician-employees.
 
It’s a situation akin to what happens in the retail space when small Mom & Pop stores, unable to compete with the giants, are forced to sell or fold. Interestingly, it’s the same dynamic that’s happened down on the farm, where small farm families feel tremendous economic pressure to either farm for “Big Ag” or sell off their land and move someplace warm—if they can afford to. Welcome to corporate feudalism!
 
But I digress.
 
Doctors who do want to stay in the doctoring game are eagerly looking for new sources of revenue. More than 40% of our respondents said they are looking to incorporate products, services or procedures that would generate new cash streams.
 
Hear that, people? Forty percent of primary care doctors are looking for new ways to make money, and the sale of supplements and natural products is a prime option for fulfilling that need.
 
Interestingly, physician interest in supplement sales was robust among doctors who plan to stay in insurance-based medicine as well as those who are thinking about jumping off the insurance treadmill. With continued downward pressure on insurance reimbursement, it seems that many insurance-based docs are having trouble making ends meet. Office-based dispensing is looking a lot more attractive to a lot more doctors.
 
That said, there are numerous stumbling blocks that make physicians wary, and companies that can address these obstacles have the best shot at winning a strong segment of the coveted practitioner dispensing market.
 
Respondents told us that beyond ethical and quality concerns, one of the biggest obstacles is logistics. Most physicians do not understand the dynamics of “retailing,” and after all, office-based dispensing is really a form of retailing. Many of them are unsure of how to go about bringing product lines into their offices and how to engage patients in an ethical and unobtrusive manner.
 
Anything you can do to streamline the process and provide physicians with turnkey tools for implementation of a dispensing strategy will improve your ability to win new practitioner customers.
 
The survey showed a clear overlap between the types of supplements that doctors take for their own health—and the good news is that most doctors are taking basic nutraceuticals—and the sort of products they will recommend to their patients. This was true even among doctors who do not sell supplements and have no interest in doing so.
 
The message here is that if you can make physicians personally aware of the health value of your company’s products, if they have direct experience with the products, they are more likely to be comfortable recommending them to patients. In this sense, doctors are no different than the rest of us; we all like to tell others about things we like and products that have helped us feel better.
 
Be aware, however, that in order to engage physicians you need to have a strong trust proposition, not just a value proposition. Reservations about product quality and efficacy, while not a primary deterrent to office-based dispensing, was certainly a concern among the survey respondents. Bottom line is that if you want practitioners to support your brands—whether as direct points of sale or as consumer influencers—you need to be able to guarantee the safety and quality of your products and the validity of your claims.
 
Healthcare in this country is at a unique, troubling and exciting break-point, and not just because of healthcare reform. Obama-care or no Obama-care, the dynamics that are driving doctors to seek change are going to continue. The healthcare reform plan could even intensify their desire for new practice models and new revenue streams. Doctors are already working at capacity under current insurance plans. How are they going to handle 40 million more patients?
 
But even if the Republicans and the Tea Partiers have their way and somehow manage to kill off the reform plan, the basic facts remain that insurance plans add tremendous overhead costs to primary care without adding to the quality of the care or the patient-physician interaction. They also create tremendous hassle-factors for doctors.
 
Keep in mind that physician unrest didn’t begin in 2008 when Obama was elected. The shift toward holistic medicine and the emergence of direct-pay and concierge-care models were both in full swing 10 years ago, while Bush & Co were running things in Washington. This is not about politics, it’s about how to create better health. The real creative solutions are going to come from patients, doctors and the ethical businesses that derive value from fostering the therapeutic relationship.
 
Now, that’s change I can believe in. I hope you will agree!
 
Want to learn more about the practitioner channel? Get the details!
 
Holistic Primary Care’s new report, “Primary Care Physicians & Holistic Medicine: Transition, Transformation, Opportunity—An Executive Report from Holistic Primary Care’s 2010 Physicians’ Survey,” provides comprehensive analysis of physician attitudes, practice patterns and personal experience with holistic nutrition-based medicine, nutraceuticals and natural products. It is the first survey of its kind to assess a large and representative sampling of conventionally trained Medical Doctors across the U.S. The full report, complete with charts, graphs and a detailed analysis, is available for purchase at www.holisticprimarycare.net, or contact Erik Goldman at 212-406-8957 or [email protected].