Time Really Can Be Money

By Kim Bellard, February 26, 2020

If you are not an IKEA fan, or haven’t been spending any time in Dubai, you may have missed the chain’s marketing campaign to help promote its second store in the area. Titled “Buy With Your Time,” customers got store credits for how long they spent getting to the store.

Gosh, that’s something that should make any self-respecting critic of the U.S. healthcare system perk up. Count me as intrigued.

The campaign involved checking the customer’s Google Maps’ Trip tab to determine how long it took them to get to the store. IKEA benchmarked the average hourly wage in Dubai, and converted the travel time into how much credit they’d generated. It works out to about $29/hour, or $0.48 per minute. Spend long enough getting there and you could get a free coffee table or even a bookcase. Prices in the store include the equivalent time currency.

It is believed to be the first time a retailer is letting customers use their time as a means of payment. The program seems to have been a success.

I love this campaign for a couple reasons. One is the concept that it recognizes that, yes, our time is valuable, and not just in a lip service sort of way. The second is that “money” is a broader, more elusive, concept than the formal forms of currency that we usually use.

Healthcare should be thinking about both of those.

Travel is often not a prime consideration in healthcare, with medical tourism and centers of excellence still not achieving mainstream status. We like our healthcare local, failing to recognize that, for most of us, local is far from the best care we could get. But what if, taking a page from Ikea’s campaign, the time we spend traveling to — and taking off work for — sources of higher quality care translated into credits that we could use to pay for that care?

More important than travel time is the waiting. I have railed before about how the healthcare system often treats our time almost contemptuously. As I put it previously, we wait to get appointments, we wait at appointments, we wait during appointments, we wait for results after appointments, and, if we’re in a hospital or nursing home, we spend most of our time waiting.

Healthcare should be valuing the time we spend in the system waiting for something to happen. Some parts of the healthcare system seem to track and report waiting time — e.g., urgent care centers or emergency departments come to mind — but they don’t seem to do much with that information.

Imagine instead of paying health insurance premiums we accrue credits for our good health behaviors, which can be redeemed when we need some sort of intervention to maintain or improve our health. Ikea couldn’t have done its campaign without Google Maps, and we’re getting close to the kind of 24/7 tracking options that would allow for us to determine and manage such credits.

The problem will be that no existing entities in the healthcare system are really equipped (or incented) to administer such an approach, opening the door to new types of market entrants. Maybe we should ask the people at IKEA…

IKEA’s effort may just have been a clever gimmick to promote a new store in an isolated location, but there are lessons to be learned from it nonetheless. As Mr. Aten suggested, turning pain points for the customer into a win for the customer is, in fact, a win. If there is something that we can all agree on, it is that healthcare has too many pain points for its customers. The question is: how can we turn them into wins for those customers?

This post is an abridged version of the original posting in Medium. Please follow Kim on Medium and on Twitter (@kimbbellard)