Most healthcare startups aim to improve existing processes. Amenities Health chose a bolder path: creating an entirely new category around patient loyalty. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, founder Aasim Saeed shared why they’re betting on category creation despite healthcare’s resistance to change.
The Missing Category
“We say we’re the premier digital front door and loyalty platform,” Aasim explains. “Loyalty is the category we want to get to and create, but that doesn’t exist. I would argue there’s no loyalty in healthcare today.”
This wasn’t just intuition. Their research revealed that not a single patient among 6,000 surveyed stayed exclusively with one healthcare brand over two years. Even more surprising, healthcare systems couldn’t measure loyalty: “There’s not a single health system in the country that can tell you the lifetime value of a patient. It is literally not a metric that’s defined.”
The Amazon Prime Parallel
Aasim draws inspiration from Amazon’s transformation of retail: “Once Prime figured out that like, two-day shipping resolved my immediate satisfaction… and that I could return anything without having shipping costs, oh my goodness. My moral hazard went away from e-commerce.”
This analogy shapes Amenities Health’s approach to loyalty. “You know what’s undeniable loyalty is when they’re paying $9 a month to be a member of your membership program,” Aasim notes. The membership model addresses healthcare’s cost transparency crisis while creating predictable revenue.
Building the Category
Creating a new category requires finding evangelists. “We need to find evangelists,” Aasim shares. “The good news is there are, we are already in talks with about five to ten different health systems who are talking about loyalty and we’re going to help them define and build it.”
Their strategy involves demonstrating market impact: “If you could see 10% market share shift from their competitors to them because they created a better experience, now the profit motive and greed and all the best parts of capitalism take over.”
Why Category Creation Makes Sense
Several factors support their category creation bet:
- Massive Lifetime Value: Healthcare’s patient lifetime value reaches millions, justifying investment in retention.
- Competitive Differentiation: Health systems currently compete on quality metrics that mean little to consumers.
- Market Size: Even small market share shifts could be worth “$100 million new that year.”
- No Existing Solutions: The closest metric, “network utilization management,” shows even leading systems retain only 30-40% of patient visits.
The Future Vision
Amenities Health isn’t just creating features – they’re reshaping how healthcare systems think about patient relationships. “We’re trying to establish a financial model that the largest players in healthcare can get excited about to really shift the market for the majority of Americans,” Aasim explains.
For founders considering category creation, Amenities Health’s journey offers crucial insights: ensure the category addresses fundamental industry problems, build clear ROI metrics, and find early adopters willing to help define the category. Most importantly, be prepared for the long game – changing how an industry thinks requires persistence and proof.