This is a linkpost for https://waitbutwhy.com/2021/04/lanby.html
If you're interested in this, it might also be worth checking out One Medical (which I have a membership at, here's my referral code which I think only helps you?), which has the feature that appointments are easy to get soon and also the feature that the spaces are nice, while not having changed the experience of talking with the doctor all that much (which seems to be a big part of their dream, and may or may not be part of what they're delivering). In particular, One Medical doesn't the 'three-person-team' model which I imagine will be doing most of the work with The Lanby.
Also it's $200/year instead of $2k/year, and is available lots of places besides Manhattan.
This is a long post, unnecessarily broken up by illustrations, that takes a long time to get to anything resembling a point. It also seems to be written with the purpose of shilling some sort of startup or product.
Now, I don’t necessarily have anything against any of these things, but… they do dramatically lower my estimate of the likelihood that reading the post will be a good use of my time.
With that in mind: is there any chance we could get some sort of “executive summary”? OP, I get the sense that you’re trying to convey that this is something important or valuable—so, would you consider writing a few sentences about what the heck this post is about?
Uncharitable summary:
The Lanby is building a primary care utopia no one else thought of, even though it's obvious, with focus on prevention, quality care and free unicorns.
Hmm.
Now, this may be a stupid question, but I can’t seem to find the answer on a skim or Cmd-F of the post: why is this… thing… called “the Lanby”? What is a… lanby?
I'm interested in opinions about this. I haven't thought too hard about it, but my current take is that it's too much money to spend for someone who is young and doesn't have much health-related stuff to deal with. But on the other hand, it seems very plausible that health is just that important, and it is worth it.
I think if you're earning 100k/yr, it's pretty likely that improvements to your health can make you more than 2% more productive, and thus it's worth it. Unfortunately I think this is pretty spiky, where some people will get >10% improvements and many people will get 0% improvements, and it may be possible to tell ahead of time which group you'll be in. [Like, the relevant factor shouldn't be "I'm young" but something more like "I love the experience of being in my body."]
The spiky part makes sense. I'm the type of person who is very accepting of expected value based reasoning, so I'm not turned off by it. Although it does beg the question of whether I am the type of person who is a spike or not. I don't feel like I am, but maybe there's something I'm overlooking. Do you have any thoughts on what makes someone a spike?
2% productive seems possible, but I don't really have a good sense of what that number is. Would you mind talking a little bit about what leads you to this belief?
Do you have any thoughts on what makes someone a spike?
I mean, the OP has two examples of the target customer: someone with a serious autoimmune disorder, and someone who got breast cancer while young.
My interest in this sort of thing stems from having low energy compared to people around me, and wouldn't be surprised if there's a medical treatment available that somehow increases my productive hours by 20-100%. Compare to my boyfriend, who already works >60hr weeks, where I would be astounded if a similar intervention existed for him.
2% productive seems possible, but I don't really have a good sense of what that number is. Would you mind talking a little bit about what leads you to this belief?
In terms of inputs, that looks like "you get one more hour of productive work done per week" for a regular full-timer, which I think is a reasonable thing to expect if you, say, your sleep is 10 minutes more efficient each night, or your diet is better such that you have 10 minutes more of focused energy per day. Or the story might be 'fewer sick days'--if you're working 250 days a year, then you need to shave 5 sick days off a year (which is many fewer than I was taking to start with, for example, but is probably well within the realm of possibility for the two founders).
[This also is assuming it just costs the money--however, if the active ingredient is that you're seeing doctors more often, or spending limited experimental budgets on health things instead of other things, then it can be much harder to pay for itself. And it's assuming that your productivity is somehow measured in a way that flows back to you--if you need to increase your productivity by 5% to get a 2% raise, then for this to be strictly worth it on financial grounds you'd need to get a 5% improvement from increased health.]
I think the biggest wins are among people who have something subtly wrong with them that can be fixed.
In Strategies for Personal Growth terms, you have a problem that can be fixed with healing.
I’m quite skeptical that improvements will be realized by this methodology. Not clear that there are health improvement gains in expectation.
Y'all heard about this already, right?