Dominic Howard discusses Best Doctor's plans for expansion into the mainstream with Paul Robertson
There is a certain irony in discussing a shared medical problem with Dominic Howard. As director of Best Doctors he has the opinions of thousands of the planet's best doctors potentially at his finger tips, although they may be less than fascinated with our mutually dodgy Achilles. The service may act as a medical second opinion provider, but it is really for those with serious medical conditions.
Best Doctors is thought of as an afterthought by many brokers, a random bolt-on that, while it certainly adds value to a policy, is not intrinsic to its benefits. Howard, nursing several cricket-based injuries, is keen to point out this is not the case: "We have brokers on record as saying this is a valuable tool in the sales kit. It is a door opener and an ice breaker.
"In the main, brokers have been positive, the product sits well with all protection products and moves the product away from appearing to be commoditised. Essentially we are trying to move away from a ‘here's a service, I'm sure you'll like it, slap it on' approach to saying these are the positive commercial reasons for having the service."
The providers adding the service to their protection offering are only too well aware of this, with one in Australia, having researched the introduction of the Best Doctor's service on lapse rates, finding a 7% improvement. Having offered this information, Howard downplays it: "Most providers would bite your arm off for that, we can't say this would apply across a bigger survey but what we saw was soundly done."
In the US, Best Doctors is sold only as an employee benefit, through employee assistance programmes, and has recently picked up clients such as Boeing, Pepsi and Hilton. "In the States there is nobody else involved with our service but what we give to employers is medical cost savings. Now, this is much harder to measure in this country, we don't have the same system," says Howard.
Market penetration is firmly on Howard's mind and the firm is not just considering the usual routes. Howard says: "In every type of protection product you can think of there is an example of our presence; income protection (IP), life and critical illness (CI), hospital cash plans, private medical insurance, etc..."
Best Doctors is currently rolling out with Bupa on their individual IP product. "This is quite interesting as this is the first individual IP provider we have been involved with." says Howard. "We will (in the next two months) probably be taking on other protection providers. Basically we have providers selling through the broker market and those selling through the bancassurers. We are now getting more penetration into both sectors.
"It has been a really good year, and I'm not entirely sure where this has all come from. We know we have a great service and that 98% of our users say they would recommend us to friends or family, but our client's attitude is to ask if this is going to sell more policies or is it going to help me retain more business."
Evolving the service
Being close to the providers in the market gives Howard an impartial overview of its activity, he notes the management of Scot Prov and Bright Grey amalgamating, but, more importantly, amongst the firm's own client base he has seen HBos going into Lloyds banking group, increasing the firm's bancassurer business. "Perhaps what is more relevant to us is to evolve the service so that it becomes more widely available, perhaps at an earlier point in the chain," he adds.
Best Doctors already has a handful of employers that have access to the service. "At the moment we are considering whether it is something that we want to turn into a specific focus. This is because we don't want to cannibalise our market," says Howard. "This is the reason in the States we have not gone into the insurance business, because we have stuck with employee benefit systems. However, there will be an opportunity in this country to offer the service to employers, maybe those that have a relationship with us in the States."
Best Doctors has also signed a deal with Kids Unlimited, who provide childcare vouchers. "We are now an automatic feature of that voucher so that is one way to asking if there is another service we can be a part of. However, we clearly don't want to do that too much. There are also brokers that are keen on making our services directly available to their clients, so we have picked up with Yoursure, Oval and one or two others."
Howard is at great pains that the service feels the need to be to be strategic with this sort of thinking. One avenue the firm is tentatively exploring is that of affinity groups.
These could be of massive interest to us - the credit cards and the supermarkets. These are areas where there is a membership base which is experiencing rather commoditised services.
"Whether this would cannibalise our markets depends. If you look at protection, and the sort of people who take it out, we are talking about only three clients with in excess of 300,000 lives and then there are some dependents included. It might total two million out of 60 million." says Howard.
So how does Best Doctor's work? How is its service structured and how does it see itself evolving? Essentially, Howard explains, when Best Doctors began, the idea was to find doctors that had been voted for by other doctors as the best in their field. "We approached heads of department in teaching hospitals and asked "If you had a serious condition, who would you want treating you or your family?" he says.
"We were getting them to think personally, as well as clinically. This process built a pool of nominated doctors, who were asked the same question. By degrees we built up a seed list, organised it into the various categories of speciality and asked the original doctors to vote. We then took the top 3-5%."
Nobody pays to get on the data base and nobody is paid to be on it. The firm sees this as important as it keeps it impartial and objective, doctors are only paid at the point that they are asked to write a report. For its part, apart from compiling the list, Best Doctors undertakes to collect clients' medical information, analysing and auditing it, and checking the report generated by the service's doctor.
As for the development of the product: "We have moved away from being associated with the big degenerative conditions and woken up to the fact that we have a lot of expertise within muscular skeletal disciplines and this has become very important for a lot of our clients," says Howard.
An interactive service
"One thing we might do, and we are going to test this with an existing client - just amongst their staff - is an online service allowing people to ask pretty much any medical question they have. It will be interactive and aimed toward non acute questions that need taking to the next level. We could give useful doctor to individual information. So that is really the next thing in the pipeline."
Best Doctors also looked into providing something in the area of mental illness and decided that our model simply wasn't up to that. "You simply need to see the patient for that one, you can't just send a report off," adds Howard.
Perhaps surprisingly there is little complaint among the medical fraternity about the service: "Good doctors think it's great, they see no threat," says Howard. "I suspect some may think they could be undermined, but we live in an age of people printing stuff off the internet anyway. Doctors are already being challenged and many see this as not necessarily a bad thing, they are dealing with better educated patients. In effect the job is to support, not replace, the treating doctor."
While Best Doctors is still seen as an addition to UK protection policies, there is no doubt that it will soon enter the mainstream. The firm is a major player in the US employee assistance programme market and has become ubiquitous in the Canadian protection market. It is probably fair to surmise that, as in Canada where all protection policies include Best Doctors cover, we may reach a tipping point where the absence of Best Doctors becomes a point for not recommending a protection product, moving the service from being a differentiator to being an expected component.
Current medical trends would back this up: "We now have 41 % of people going online and researching their condition after seeing the doctor. This research, across 10 European nations, indicates the web is fuelling a need for further information, and this is not going to stop, expectations are higher," concludes Howard, massaging his Achilles.
