Value-Based Lawn Care – Life Imitating Healthcare

Ah, spring. Warmer weather, budding trees and the return of that big ball of light in the sky. The clearest sign of spring? The arrival of lawn-care flyers in my neighborhood. It’s only been a week of spring and already I have received over 15 flyers.

Normally I just throw these flyers out – taking care of my lawn is a responsibility I prefer not to outsource – but this year one company’s flyer caught my eye. Instead of the pay-as-you-mow or weekly visit programs offered by their competitors, this particular company was offering a program that guaranteed a green lawn until the start of fall. For a set price they would aerate, weed, spray, fertilize, cut and trim your lawn as needed.

“Have a healthy, weed-free lawn all summer. Let us do all the preventative and maintenance work. You just enjoy your weekends.”

Here was a company that was eschewing the industry’s volume-based standard practice and opting for a value-based offering instead. This company smartly recognized that homeowners do not want someone to come and care for their lawn on a regular basis but rather a healthy green lawn. The process to get that healthy lawn makes no difference, just the outcome. Funny how no government penalty system or legislation was need to pressure lawn-care providers into adopting a value-based model.

I must admit I never thought that the lawn care industry in my neighborhood would be going through the same volume-vs-value challenge as we are in healthcare.

I wouldn’t have made this connection had it not been for the excellent post by Sarah Bennight, Director of Marketing at eMedApps. She wrote about the four key requirements she believes are necessary for transitioning to value-based care:

  1. Strong quality measures
  2. Comprehensive population health
  3. Predictive analytics and trending in the clinical setting
  4. Breaking down silos

The lawn-care industry doesn’t have any comparable challenges (or consequences) like those mentioned by Bennight. I can’t imagine that competing landscaping companies are all that interested in sharing data or breaking down industry silos. However, I do think that healthcare can look to other industries for inspiration and ideas to address our own transition to a value-based world.

Better go seed my lawn now.

About the author

Colin Hung

Colin Hung is the co-founder of the #hcldr (healthcare leadership) tweetchat one of the most popular and active healthcare social media communities on Twitter. Colin speaks, tweets and blogs regularly about healthcare, technology, marketing and leadership. He is currently an independent marketing consultant working with leading healthIT companies. Colin is a member of #TheWalkingGallery. His Twitter handle is: @Colin_Hung.

1 Comment

  • I would like to add another determinant to that list, which is the existence of the right marketplace for value based transactions to occur. According to economic theory if we want a certain type of transaction it is important for the market and its participants to support those matching transactions. Right now, most providers are only doing 1-4 because of the stick (or carrot in the case of payments as part of CMMI experiments) and that is hoping for behavior change with monetary incentives. We already know from behavioral psychology that monetary incentive structures do not sustain behavior change.

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