Business consultancy is a service business in itself. Therefore, this post will dig deeper into another industry, that I have recently gotten in contact with through my aunt who is a surgeon. Also, it is an industry where consultants often assist with more strategical issues. What I am talking about is the healthcare industry in Sweden, where servitization has become a more and more central concept during the latest years.

As a simple description, hospitals are a place where you go when you are sick, you get treated and hopefully everything turns out well and you come back good and healthy again. This way of looking at the industry, healthcare is a mix of a product and a service industry. You go to the hospital to get a healthcare service from the doctors and nurses and when you are there, and possible after as well, you get a treatment/product in the form of medicine or a bandage on your broken arm.

With hospitals, it all seems very straight forward. You go there if you need it, you don’t weigh pros and cons when choosing which one to go to but probably go to the closest one or the one offering what you need and you prefer to be there as little as possible. In Sweden, with insurances and an extensive state-wide healthcare system, costs associated with a hospital visit are rarely something that would make you choose one hospital over another, because they are all pretty much the same. But why is servitization becoming more and more relevant in the healthcare industry then? As Nina Löfberg explains in the video about the subject, servitization is a way for companies to differentiate themselves to gain competitive advantages. But for Swedish hospitals, that is not of too much relevance since the need to compete is not a major issue.

Still, many hospitals in Sweden strive to have a good customer experience and to offer services outside the basic scope of healthcare. They have hotels close by for relatives visiting, they have funny clowns entertaining the children, they have pharmacies, nice coffee shops and sometimes even bars and restaurants and much, much more. There may be several reasons for this increased servitization focus. One could simply be that the government owned hospitals wishes to receive more government money to be able to run their business more smoothly. Another can be reputation, that the hospital wants to look good nation- or worldwide in order to get the best doctors or the best R&D.

However, I think it is more than anything about the actual customers, the patients staying at the hospital. It is not fun to be sick. Especially, severely sick. These are the hospitals where we see most of the servitization focus. If you are very sick, you might need to stay at the hospital for a long time. In order to make the best of the situation, and actually to get healthier quicker, it is of importance that you are feeling as comfortable as possible with where you live. It is important to have a funny clown coming to visit to even bear the thought of being there. Furthermore, it’s not just you but your whole family that gets affected. Therefore, they need somewhere to stay. What is then better than a hotel just next doors?

I can go on a long time about this subject, because I think that it is interesting and because it affects us all, although hopefully not too severely. However, I will stop here, after making a short statement about the challenges of the topic. Because it is not all that simple to try to bring in services outside the normal scope in a government owned (Sweden) industry that has as a primarily focus to get people healthy and at the same time trying to keep costs down. It is not the easiest to prove how a clown will make any difference, or why a personalized hotel room with playstation and a nice hotel lobby will get the patients healthier quicker. Luckily enough, there are proves for some of the cases, and perhaps luckily enough not for other. Nevertheless, I think we could all agree that if we, forbid, would get to a hospital, we would sure appreciate spending our time there with a bit more of servitization around.

#mssl70