Tackling Physiotherapy
Hello, world! I recently wrote a post about why I’m embarking on an entrepreneurship journey. It was a great self-reflection exercise, but it lacked details about where exactly this journey is headed. So let’s dive in.
Imagine you were in a car accident, wait, no, that’s terrible — but it is possible. Maybe let’s think of a sports injury, yeah, that’s a bit easier to accept (and it has the added bonus of seeing ourselves as people who actually do sports :). So, you have a sports injury, and now to recover, among other things, you need to go to a special physical therapist. They will diagnose your problem, create a special exercise regimen for your recovery, manually work with you once or twice a week, and expect you to do most of the work by yourself every day at home or at a gym. This process can easily get confusing, as remembering the flow of the regimen, the particular details about each exercise, and making sure you’re doing things right can be overwhelming. Then, if that’s not enough, you may have to worry about what exactly your medical insurance will cover, what kind of treatments, how many, and what will you do if you need more than what is provided. Lots of Not Cool!
This is true for many people that need physiotherapy, and there are a plethora of reasons why one would need it. In fact, the industry yearly revenues were estimated at $37B in the US alone (2019). The cost of a single session can range from $50 to $350 if a patient is not covered by health insurance.
Our working thesis is that by providing a self-service physiotherapy application we can significantly reduce those costs. To elaborate, we believe that using your phone, smart TV, laptop, tablet or a combination of those, we can diagnose, create a tailored recovery exercise regimen, and help you see it through to your full recuperation.
We believe that by creating a simple and intuitive experience, we can help you do your exercises correctly, track your progress, and challenge you to keep to your regimen. Because of this, we can increase the efficacy of your at-home therapy, reduce and in some cases even replace the need for manual therapy. Because of our lower operational costs and our ability to follow your progress, we can provide you with a solution to your problem, not a coverage length dictated by the actuaries of your medical insurance (if you have it).
This is super exciting, but it’s just the beginning. We’re learning at every step of the way, looking for pain points, overcoming obstacles, ideating around challenges, and always moving on. Most recently, we’ve mapped out the various reasons to need physiotherapy, dug into the competitive landscape, and explored different revenue models that can lead to a profitable business. From D2C, partnering with large employers, health insurance carriers, governments, and other institutions, there are multiple people and organizations with a need that we can fill — it is now our job to find them.
Next up, we’ll be leveraging the upcoming Weill Cornell Health Hackathon to further our user research, and build an initial product skeleton. I’m personally looking forward to experimenting with underlying technologies, architectures, and implementations to solve this issue. Most importantly, as Gary Chou recently put it in a guest lecture: an entrepreneur would better see themselves as an explorer, rather than a founder — then just by exploring they will find success and further fuel their journey ahead.
Let’s explore!
