One of the major ongoing themes driving the disruption of healthcare as we know it is decentralization of health services, as many types of care move from the specialist provider to the general practitioner to the home. In the news this week is another chapter in this evolution.
While the task of preventing conception has long since migrated out from behind the pharmacy counter, to date the job of diagnosing infertility has been the province of specialist providers alone. According to Debora Spar, a Harvard Business School professor who studies the business of reproduction, fertility clinics took in $2.7 billion in 2002, and they are expecting robust growth as couples continue to delay starting families.
This month Genosis, a UK based biotech company, launched Fertell in the US, a his-and-hers at home fertility test that aims to bring fertility testing to the masses. And the masses might be interestedaccording to the CDC, 12% of women of childbearing age (15-44) and nearly 30% of adult men have experienced infertility.
For women, Fertell works by measuring levels of FSH (Follicle Stimulating Hormone), an indicator of the ability of the ovaries to produce eggs for fertilization. For men the test kit measures sperm motility, a likely cause of male infertility. The test is sold at drugstores and retails for around $100.
Fertell doesnt look at all causes of infertility such as irregular luteinizing hormone, estrogen, and progesterone, and is only 95% accurate (as opposed to >99% in doctor administered blood tests). However, the key benefits of the "good enough Fertell offering read like a page in the disruptive-innovation-in-healthcare playbook: competing against non-consumption in early detection of infertility, patient-managed care, privacy and convenience, speed and low cost.
Bringing Up Baby
Alex LeichtmanPosted by Alex Leichtman | Comments (3)
Discussion
Posted: Friday, June 29th, 2007 - 5:03 am EDT
Hey Alex, I just read your "Bringing Up Baby" post on the blog and wanted to get your thoughts on something that's been bugging me. Whenever I see a "good enough" diagnostic technology enter the retail market, there's an uproar in the medical community that "good enough" is a detrimental concept in healthcare. A similar reaction killed off the attempt several years ago to make self-pay CT scans widely available to the public. If this were another industry, I'd probably just chalk it up to being a typical incumbent response. Yet as a healthcare worker, I can understand how lower sensitivities/specificities of these new tests can lead to additional expensive testing and unnecessary worrying by the patient. Once those costs get added into the equation, can we really call some of these new tests "good enough"? Your blog entry mentions that the true advantages of these diagnostics are really along new dimensions like convenience and privacy (rather than cost), so I wonder if we should acknowledge that we may need to sacrifice cost for some of these other components of value, at least in the short-term...
Posted: Friday, June 29th, 2007 - 5:32 am EDT
Jason,
Those are good points. As a healthcare consumer, it is definitely the convenience and privacy that are the new dimensions of performance for me. Even though I am not yet thinking about having kids, I would look on the investment of $100 or so as worthwhile for the peace of mind that things are still okay in the fertility department...as long as I didn't have to endure the somewhat embarrassing ritual of going to the doctor and risking that he thinks I am a Chicken Little for worrying about fertility as a relatively young single woman. And as you allude to in your post, I also worry that I would be further taxing hte healthcare system with an "unnecessary" test. I know that if I ever did need to consume fertility treatments like IVF or egg harvesting, insurance would probably not bear the cost, so an early jump on saving or prevention would also be worth the cost.
Looking through some of the marketing materials for Fertell, it seems like I am a consumer they are interested in targeting: someone who is likely to buy the test on an annual basis as a self-checkup. Imagine the interesting business models that could generate...
Posted: Tuesday, September 11th, 2007 - 7:29 am EDT
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