Yesterday, our team completed a month-long project with Young Health consultants (from one of the big4) in which health consultants conducted research to answer this one question: care or no care. They made a risk assessment for us to enter the healthcare market, how best to do that (have our hardware certified medically or not), and what would be required for that. We had a diverse group of consultants at our disposal, all with their expertise and experience within the health market. It looks promising!
Gymstory’s goal is to make every fitness practitioner (in the gym) successful and help them achieve their goal. This means that our platform motivates users to exercise more and be healthy. Although our digital platform is not die-hard medical technical (MedTech), our proposition does fall within digital health, e-health, and preventive health. That is why we are affiliated with Smart Health Amsterdam and occasionally attend health conferences.
Earlier we wrote something about preventive health, read it here.
One of the modules of our platform is aimed at personal trainers and helping them with the support of their clients. This guidance is very similar to what physiotherapists do in physio fitness, with exercise and exercises trying to remedy physical complaints. That is why fitness is a widely used tool in physiotherapy, rehabilitation, and other forms of medical or paramedical treatment. Our product is naturally close to this market and perhaps this could be an interesting market to enter.
In recent months, our team has further elaborated on this option and talked to several physicians about possible options and lingering interests. It emerged that objectively measuring exercise results can support the physiotherapists in their work to better serve the client. This is a good starting point for us.
The research by the Young Health consultants subsequently showed that the Dutch market for physiotherapy is twice as large as the fitness market, with 4 million vs. 2.2. million practitioners. That makes the size in itself interesting. It also turned out that our proposition has sufficient prospects to position itself in a unique place within the market. Gymstory's platform is sufficiently distinctive compared to other commonly used products such as PhysiApp®.
As a team, we are pleased with their research. Because of their experience, our diverse research group has done better research than we could do ourselves and the results will help us make an informed choice to answer the main question.