With banks, mobile phone companies, large retailers already won over as clients, providers of private healthcare start to consider subscription offers for individuals.
“Individual clients account for a larger share of the overall market than in previous years,” says Doina Zidaroiu, sales manager of Medsana Medical Center. The company, which registered 17,500 corporate subscriptions in August, is currently working on its offer of individual subscriptions which is set to be launched next month.
Gral Medical, controlled by Robert and Georgeta Serban, also plans to develop the segment of individual subscriptions.
“By the end of 2011 we estimate we will secure nearly 7,000 individual subscriptions by launching a new card,” said Robert Chitan, promotion-development manager of Gral Medical. In the first eight months of this year, the company had 60,000 subscriptions, a stagnation against 2010.
MedLife, the largest local healthcare company in terms of turnover, does not have individual subscriptions in its offer, despite providing services to 155,000 corporate subscribers.
Representatives of Regina Maria say most of the 140,000 subscriptions that the operator registered in August are corporate.
In the case of Medicover, around 75% of packages are corporate, according to Catalina Balan, general manager of the company. Medicover has around 100,000 subscriptions.
The Arcadia hospital in Iasi, which was inaugurated last summer following an over EUR20 million investment, has already sold 1,000 subscriptions. It has sold healthcare subscriptions to around 100 companies with a total of 4,000 employees.
Healthcare subscriptions are benefits offered by employers to their employees, which generally include free doctor visits and price cuts for tests and even a set of tests free of charge. The price of a healthcare subscription ranges between a few euros and several tens of euros, depending on the operator and the complexity of the serices offered, but in the case of corporate subscriptions, significant discounts are achieved because the negotiation is done for a package deal.
The move of private clinics to new market segments comes at a time when the corporate subscription market has experienced economic problems since the beginning of the crisis.
“The subscription market has stagnated or even declined lately due to the difficult economic situation which led to the shutting down of many companies, as well as to job cuts for operational companies,” said MedLife president Mihai Marcu.
(English version by Daniela Stoican)