Posts from — September 2006

Again Germany could be a sample how to deal with the complexities of the rehab market sucessfully. If you take the right decision on the trivial question: Who is my customer?

To identify your customer is one of the basics in marketing. You do a segmentation or you “enlarge your pond”, it is a daily execise.

In the rehab industry of Western Europe the definititon of the customer is always a little bit complicated. You have the patient who uses your product, a therapist, who advises the patient and in most of the countries a dealer who buys from you. In the end the bill is mostly paid by a public healthfund. In the Nordic countries the scenario is a little bit clearer as a public health supplier decides about the products and you do not have dealers. In England you find parallel markets public and private. In Germany, however, we find the whole range of complexity: patient, of course, therapists, dealers and public insurances as payors of the party. Therefore you will find a lot of different but not always consistent answers who the customer is.

As far as I can see there are not many companies with a clear customer definition on the German market. Some have decided but they do not act consistently.

Example: Kuschall has a clear patient oriented marketing but the high-price super-designed chairs shall be paid by the public (bankrupt) health insurance.

Let’s look to an example of a consistent decision about the customer: Lifestand, the French manufacturer of verticalization wheelchairs! They decided that without any compromise the patient is their customer. They get him directly in the clinic, they support him with samples at home and they offer a lawyer service which helps to get the approval from the public insurance if necessary by a lawsuit. This system is so perfect that sometimes the customer did not even know that the company has sent its lawyer to put pressure on the health insurance. Dealers get only a finder’s and application fee because Lifestand is not allowed to apply directly to the insurances. - This little disadvantage will disappear next year. - This consequently worked out strategy helped Lifestand to focus the salesforce in competence and approach very effectively.

Lifestand enjoys strong double digit growth, took over 50% of the market share (manually propelled chairs) of the former quasi monopolist Levo and kept the prices up.

Do you remember my first update? This story does not work in a one stop shopping environment. So how can companies with more than one product line do it? Best (not perfect) example is Sunrise (Sopur). But this is another story.

Jean Anouilh Quotes “what you get free costs too much”…. my quote - “tell this to my clients”

Vestar Capital announced today it was acquiring MediMedia Information Technologies Vestar is the group that took Sunrise Medical private in 2000 in a $365 transaction and is now adding to their healthcare portfolio

Carina Fully Implantable Hearing Device from Otologics. Unique hearing device implanted under the skin and thus not visable externally. Product in advanced stage of development with patients currently being recruited for clinical study.

Michael Moore takes on U.S. health care Something on the lighter side - or maybe not if you are in the healthcare industry…

Merkel postpones health reform by three months - sources - Forbes.com Postpones the central creation of “the Health Fund” structure but does not postpone increased employee contributions. “Lowering patient costs” equals lowering medical product acquisition cost? Also see this an insiders perspective.

NPM Capital, owned by the Fenter Van Vlissingen family has acquired Harting-Bank.

Harting Bank is a major supplier to the homecare and associated markets in the Netherlands and has recently reported revenues of 80 million Euros.

The acquisition provides considerable financial strength to this already strong player. The market is expecting a consolidation in the homecare provider industry which largely comprises companies such as Welzorg (by far the largest with revenues in the 200 million euro range) as well as R. Van Seeneus/Beenhakker, German owned Meyra, Emcart and several smaller players.

Enno Perdok, Managing Director of Harting-Bank has been reported as saying that they are on the lookout for further acquisitions now that they have the financial support.

Welzorg, themselves also having been recently acquired by Industri Capital (reported here) may well be in for a challenge to its dominant position?