An article in yesterday's Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune described how a new healthcare services website, Carol.com, is potentially transforming the landscape for providers and consumers of healthcare. Carol.com is a local "marketplace" where hospitals, clinics and practices can offer service packages for fixed and transparent prices, enabling consumers to "shop around".

Think of it as a Turkish bazaar where the wares are displayed in stalls lining the alleys side by side, and where the consumer just has to wander the lanes sampling olives or fingering the fabrics and checking prices, in order to determine where and what to buy.

Here is how some of the functions of the website are described in the article:

"Ankle pain? Click on the matching body part and two options pop up. For $199, doctors at Sports and Orthopaedic Specialists will check out your ankle, review your medical history and recommend treatment. TRIA Orthopaedic Center lists a similar package for $213 -- and a reminder that they are the team doctors for the Vikings and Timberwolves.
What did patients think? Read user reviews.
Will your health plan pay? Tap in your details and find out."

I encourage you to read the full article, even though you might have to sign up as a subscriber, for free. There is lots of food for thought! And a whole new trend to prepare yourself for.

This new web-based business will likely do two things for a physician practice or a hospital:

1. Force practices and hospitals to analyze their costs of providing various services, to price them competitively and profitably.

2. Require that, in order to compete effectively, each practice or hospital may have to reinvent how it does business. As in the example from the article:
"Alarmed at how its price for treating a sinus infection ($231) stacks up next to MinuteClinic's ($49), Park Nicollet is trying to figure out how to bring that down, perhaps using nurses instead of doctors to treat simple ailments."

To attract new patients to your practice, if you want to take advantage of a similar marketing and selling opportunity  that is bound to be coming your way, what must you know about your practice in order to appropriately price and deliver your bundled services?