How would you size the market for physicians in the US?
How would you size the market for physicians in the US?
How would you size the market for physicians in the US?
My favourite approach (there are many as Guennael highlighted) is similar to Michael's: demand driven.
Why is it better than going for a more top-down one? Because it uses building blocks that you are more confident in estimating: you know reasonably well how often people get ill and how many people there are in the US. You know less well though how many people graduate as physicians/doctors per year. It all depends however on how much time you have for the market sizing case (demand driven solutions are more time intensive).
To add on top of Michael's answer I created a simplified tree for solving this case:
Remember, trees should always be your favorite tool for tackling market sizing cases as this. See why on our tutorial "Crack the Case (5/9) - Market Sizing Framework".
Notice in our simplified tree that:
At the end, don't forget to sanity-check your answer. You will make your sanity check more credible if you can think of a reference to compare your results against: "I known that in my city there are 10,000 doctors and it's population is 0.1% of that of the country's, so 7 million doctors doesn't seem like a bad estimation at all."
Agree with the general remarks above comments by Guennael.
Specifically, my approach would be:
Hope you find it useful and that I am not completely wrong :)
You could approach it a varieties of ways - we don't care which one you chose, as long as it is consistent / MECE and you quickly drive to a reasonable answer. For example (off the top of my head in the time it takes me to write this):
- How many people in the US, how many clients can a MD see?
- How many people in the US, average salary of physician is X, average profit per visity is Y
- How many physicians in my town, how many people in my town, how many people in the US
- How many medical schools in US, how big are classes, how many years a typical physician practices medicine before retiring
I'm sure you can think up a few more ways to address the question on your own. Just make sure you end result is neither "10 doctors in the US" nor "250 million physians" :)
Cheers,
Guennael
ex-BCG Dallas
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