| Addiction Treatment Industry Newswire |
01/09/2012 – ATIN- A new service is being launched that may bring a consumer auction platform along the lines of Priceline and EBay to the , seeking to auction beds and perhaps outpatient slots in much the same way that hotel rooms, air travel and a host of other goods and services are now sold over the Internet. The introduction of Priceline and other such Internet auction platforms revolutionized many consumer industries by bringing enormous price transparency to markets previously far  more price opaque and by putting big power into the hands of consumers when it comes to price setting. But the markets for hotel rooms and air travel, and other consumer markets, were still FAR more price transparent pre-Priceline than the market is today for addiction treatment services and, thus, if Book Your Care, as the new service calls itself, is successful it has the potential to very seriously and radically transform the addiction treatment industry business landscape. It is highly unlikely that big players like CRC Health, Hazelden and Elements would initially participate as their large call center investments – CRC carries its National Resource Center on the books for big bucks – give them considerable advantage over smaller players, with the big centers thus being relatively well served by the status quo. But the very high degree of ownership fragmentation in the addictions industry – CRC is by far the biggest player yet accounts for perhaps just two or three percent of assets – combined with soaring business risk from the Tyranny of Google ($70 per click has recently been seen) could make Book Your Care an ideal platform by which smaller players could wash their hands of a highly complex, and increasingly very risky, marketing feat by simply putting their beds out to auction. If enough smaller centers participate, Book Your Care could become big and powerful enough to drag the bigger addictions players on to the auction platform kicking and screaming, which is what occurred in the market for hotel rooms on platforms like Hotels.com, Priceline and now many others. If Book Your Care does achieve this level of success, and a deep and liquid auction market in beds and other services materializes, Book Your Care will also function as what is known in places like the stock market as a platform for “price discovery,” in other words a place where prices for addictions services can be quickly and reliably ascertained. The economic importance of this function is hard to overstate as price discovery could, for example, help addictions entrepreneurs quickly determine whether expansion was warranted or not, with high prices for beds on the platform indicating a shortage and thus signaling aggressive expansion and low prices signaling a glut and thus indicating expansion caution. Book Your Care did not immediately return emails or phone calls seeking comment
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