Abolish all healthcare services

Why every healthcare service should either become a product or an experience.

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I want you to consider the possibility that healthcare services, as we know them, should no longer exist.

Not because they don't work. Many do. But because the very format of the "healthcare service" has become the bottleneck of an entire industry. It is too expensive to scale, too impersonal to engage, and too rigid to transform. It sits in an awkward middle ground where it is neither efficient enough to reach billions of people, nor meaningful enough to change their lives.

And in a world where people are more motivated to be healthy than ever before, that middle ground is becoming lethal — not for patients, but for the system itself.

The most engaged patients in history are stuck in the worst system imaginable

Here is the paradox nobody in healthcare wants to confront.

People are not disengaged from their health. They are wildly engaged. 83% of people say they want more control over their health decisions. Self-care searches have quadrupled in recent years. The global wellness economy has surpassed $6.3 trillion. Nearly nine out of ten people report actively taking steps to improve their well-being.

This is the era of Healthusiasm — the deep, widespread aspiration people have to become healthy and happy. It is not a niche trend. It is a macro-behavioural shift that has been accelerating since the 1980s and shows no signs of slowing down in the next fifty years.

And yet, the healthcare system that is supposed to serve these people remains stubbornly rooted in its old logic. Long waiting times. Burned-out staff. Spiralling costs. Experiences so poor that patients dread the very places designed to heal them. In many countries, seeing a general practitioner within two weeks has become practically impossible. For specialists, waiting stretches into months. Patients sit in packed rooms surrounded by sick people, often feeling worse than when they arrived.

The system was built to treat disease. The people it now serves are pursuing a completely different goal. They want to be healthy. They want to feel good. They want transformation, not just treatment.

The mismatch is not a detail. It is a structural failure.

The problem with "services"

To understand why this failure persists, you have to understand where healthcare services sit in the progression of economic value.

Joseph Pine and James Gilmore gave us a remarkably clear framework for this. Value evolves through stages: commodities become products, products become services, services become experiences, and experiences become transformations. At each stage, differentiation increases, engagement deepens, and the customer receives more meaningful value.

Healthcare has been stuck at the service level for decades.

A service meets a need. You are sick, so you receive treatment. A doctor prescribes. A nurse administers. A pharmacist dispenses. These are functional transactions. They solve the immediate medical problem — sometimes brilliantly — but they do little to engage the whole person. They rarely meet expectations shaped by every other industry people interact with.

This is not a criticism of the people who deliver healthcare. Clinicians, nurses, and pharmacists are often extraordinary. The problem is the format. The "service" as a delivery model carries inherent limitations that no amount of incremental improvement can fix.

Services are labour-intensive. They require highly trained professionals to be physically present, which makes them expensive and impossible to scale. Services are episodic. They activate when someone is already sick, which means the entire system is reactive by design. And services are impersonal. The paternalistic logic of "the expert tells the patient what to do" fails to create the engagement people now expect from every brand, platform, and provider they interact with.

Healthcare services were designed for a world where patients had no information, no agency, and no alternatives. That world ended years ago.

Two directions, not one

So what replaces the healthcare service?

Not one thing. Two fundamentally different things.

The healthcare service must split. Every service that currently exists should be evaluated against a single, uncomfortable question: Should this become a product, or should this become an experience?

These are not gradual improvements. They are radical redesigns moving in opposite directions on the value curve — and both are essential.

1. turn services into products

Some healthcare services are, at their core, standardised processes that could be delivered far more efficiently, cheaply, and at massive scale if they were reconceived as products.

Think about what a product does. It packages expertise into something repeatable. It removes the need for a specialist to be present every time. It scales horizontally. It makes access trivially easy.

We already see this happening. AI-powered triage systems can ask between sixty and a hundred percent of the diagnostic questions a doctor would ask, before the patient ever enters a consultation room. Digital health assistants provide medically graded answers to symptoms in real time. Automated monitoring platforms track chronic conditions continuously, flagging only the moments that require human intervention.

The most obvious examples is the vision behind companies like Forward and One Minute Clinic, which are health kiosks that aim to build healthcare infrastructure that can scale to billions of people by turning the clinical encounter itself into a product. Not a lesser version of the doctor's visit, but a fundamentally different model — one where technology handles the routine so that human expertise can be reserved for the genuinely complex.

This is not about replacing doctors. It is about recognising that much of what doctors currently do — triaging, gathering information, monitoring stable patients, refilling prescriptions — could be productised (with AI) without any loss in quality. In many cases, the product version would be better than the service version, because it would be faster, available twenty-four hours a day, and free from the bottleneck of human scheduling.

The logic is simple. If a healthcare activity can be standardised, automated, and scaled — make it a product. Make it cheaper. Make it available to everyone. Stop pretending that every health interaction requires a highly trained professional sitting across from you in a room.

2. turn services into experiences

But not everything should become a product. Some aspects of healthcare are deeply personal, emotionally charged, and life-altering. These moments should not be made cheaper and more efficient. They should be made richer, more engaging, and more transformational.

This is the other direction: turning healthcare services into experiences that people actually want to engage with.

Consider what happened in banking. In the 1960s, ATMs introduced self-service. Then came phone banking, online banking, mobile banking, wearable interfaces, and now conversational AI companions that understand your financial life. Each step didn't just digitise the previous service — it reimagined the experience around what people actually needed in that moment.

Healthcare has barely begun this journey.

When a patient is diagnosed with a chronic condition, that moment should not feel like receiving a verdict. It should be the beginning of a guided journey. When someone navigates menopause, pregnancy, or mental health recovery, they should not be handed a pamphlet and wished good luck. They should be accompanied by an experience — digital and human — that understands their emotional state, adapts to their lifestyle, and helps them feel empowered rather than diminished.

Millennials are already demanding this for years. They do not separate physical from emotional well-being. They expect healthcare to operate at the same level of personalisation, accessibility, and design quality as the best consumer platforms they use. They want clinicians who act as coaches, platforms that guide them in real time, and services that blend medical, emotional, and digital support into a seamless whole.

The Transformation Economy tells us that when experiences are truly designed around people's aspirations — their desire for energy, calm, belonging, meaningful relationships — they create engagement that no functional service can match. Patients don't just comply with a treatment plan. They invest in their own transformation.

The dangerous middle

Here is where the argument gets provocative.

The real danger for healthcare is not that it fails to innovate. It is that it innovates just enough to stay in the middle, at a service level that is not scalable, cheap enough, nor a great experience.

The middle ground — the "improved service" — is the most dangerous place in the Transformation Economy. It is too expensive to compete with true products and too shallow to compete with true experiences. It satisfies no one. It delights no one. And it scales for no one.

Every healthcare organisation should look at its current services and ask: which of these can we productise to make radically cheaper and more accessible? And which of these must we redesign into genuinely engaging, aspirational experiences?

The answer cannot be "we'll just make the existing service a bit better." That answer is a slow death disguised as progress.

From caregivers to careguides

This split has profound implications for healthcare professionals themselves.

In a productised healthcare world, clinicians are no longer the frontline for every interaction. AI handles triage, documentation, routine monitoring, and even preliminary diagnosis. The physician's role shifts behind the scenes — designing protocols, training algorithms, overseeing the system's performance. Some doctors will thrive in this role. They will become the architects of healthcare products that reach millions.

In an experience-driven healthcare world, other clinicians move in the opposite direction — deeper into the human relationship. They become careguides: not dispensers of instructions, but companions on a health journey. Their value lies not in their monopoly on medical knowledge (which AI is rapidly democratising) but in their empathy, judgment, and ability to help a person navigate the overwhelming landscape of health options.

Both roles are essential. But neither looks like the traditional healthcare service model. And that is precisely the point.

The companion future

Where does this trajectory lead?

If you extend both directions far enough, they converge in something remarkable: the continuous health companion.

Instead of episodic interventions triggered by illness, people will have a persistent, intelligent presence in their lives — part product, part experience — that monitors, guides, coaches, and connects them to the right human expertise at exactly the right moment. Not a doctor you visit. Not an app you open. A companion that is always there, always learning, always anticipating.

NEOM's original vision of a personal digital twin for every citizen. Apple's evolution from fitness tracker to health platform. The emergence of AI systems that are simultaneously reactive, proactive, and interactive. These are not isolated experiments. They are signals of the companion model emerging across industries.

Healthcare's future is not a better hospital. It is the dissolution of the hospital into a distributed, intelligent, deeply personal health ecosystem. Products for scale. Experiences for meaning. Companions for continuity.

The uncomfortable truth

Healthcare services, in their current form, are a relic of a world that no longer exists.

A world where patients had no information, no tools, and no choice but to wait. A world where health was something you outsourced entirely to professionals. A world where sitting in a room packed with sick people was considered an acceptable experience.

That world is over.

People are Healthusiasts now. They track their sleep, optimise their nutrition, monitor their biomarkers, and demand transparency from every institution they interact with. They do not want to be told what to do by a system that cannot even deliver a timely appointment. They want to be empowered to become the healthiest, happiest version of themselves.

The healthcare industry can either meet that aspiration — by radically splitting its services into scalable products and transformational experiences — or it can continue to optimise a format that was built for a different century.

The services in the middle will not survive the Transformation Economy. They never do. Products and services that fail to differentiate get commoditised. Experiences that fail to transform get forgotten.

Healthcare should not aim to improve its services. It should aim to abolish them — and replace them with something far more valuable.

Something scalable. Something meaningful. Something transformational.

Because in the era of Healthusiasm, people do not need more services.

They need products that set them free. And experiences that change their lives.

-Christophe-

Christophe Jauquet is the author of Healthusiasm and Transformational Healthcare, and a keynote speaker on how the shift towards a more health-conscious world, where people take control of their health. This consumer-driven health, called #healthusiasm, is reshaping healthcare, wellness, and consumer industries - from the outside in. 

www.healthusiasm.com