“Bundling” HIV prevention: Integrating services to promote synergistic gain
Section snippets
Bundling as synergy: offering “strategic advantage”
According to economists, bundling works best when: (1) goods/services are complementary; (2) there is a low marginal cost of added service; (3) consumers value all services; and (4) there is a low correlation in demand for different services (Bakos and Brynjolfsson, 1996). For example, my research team is conducting a randomized controlled trial testing the effect of bundling HIV/STI prevention with prenatal care. These services are complementary and there is a low marginal cost of bundling HIV
Liaison mental health services
Perhaps the earliest (documented in 1751) and best established form of bundling is use of liaison mental health services: integrating mental health services into hospital and clinic settings where patients sought care for physical illness (Callaghan et al., 2003). Within psychiatric treatment, HIV prevention has also been bundled. Carey et al. (2004) randomly assigned patients seeking outpatient psychiatric care to one of three conditions: standard of care, substance use reduction, or bundled
Bundling: benefits, challenges, future directions
There may be numerous benefits to bundling. For institutions, there can be reduced infrastructure needs and costs, the opportunity to sell more services (or simply to give them away) creating a larger market for relatively low valued products (e.g., HIV testing in an environment where it is not the primary service sought), and creation of new collaborative partnerships. For individuals at risk for HIV, bundling can breakdown barriers to care and prevention. It can provide integrated,
Acknowledgments
Support for this article comes from the National Institute of Mental Health R01-MH/HD61175 and R01-MH074399. Thanks to Dr. Edward Kaplan, Yale School of Management, who introduced the bundling nomenclature to me.
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