Customers are authorize more than ever before to take their health and wellbeing into their control. The widespread acceptance of wearable devices and the explosion of consumer health data services have formed the foundation of this growing self-help (DIY) wellness movement. Laila Zemrani refers to this convergence of technological advancements in the consumer market and health trends as the age of the Quantified Self. Her co-founders, Cagatay Demiralp, founded Fitnescity, “a platform that offers various lab tests for fitness, nutrition, and general health.” The New York City-based company recently established an alliance in conjunction with Quest Diagnostics. It brought on Devon Kennard, an American football linebacker with the Arizona Cardinals of the National Football League (NFL), as an investor in the company.
Fitnescity co-founder and CEO Zemrani state, “Fitnescity were founded to provide people with the necessary information to enhance their health and wellbeing. The mission of Fitnescity has never been more vital. We were excited to extend our services to include even more tests. This is a huge move towards our goal of building the world’s largest collection that offers wellness-related tests. The new blood panel for fitness, nutrition, and diet will be conducted through Quest Diagnostics(r) using a doctor’s request. Quest Diagnostics offers health screenings in more than 2200 Patient Service Centers. Patients can set up a screening appointment at a time that is convenient for them and receive the results within a few days.”
The biggest challenge for patients is having easy access to wellness and health testing and a centralized, understandable platform for the analysis of personal data. The most frequent time these data are made accessible to consumers is when they attend an emergency or routine health check-up with the primary or urgent health care provider. The information provided to health professionals to relay to their patients is generally designed so that patients cannot comprehend without the first’s knowledge. Wearables can provide basic information, for example, your heart rate, or the number of calories consumed. However, they don’t offer more intriguing data that people are interested in monitoring over time.
Furthermore, the companies that offer a test for consumer wellness are dispersed across the marketplace. Users must manually input and an eye on the data from these tests using an Excel spreadsheet or another method of organizing. The lack of deeper information about health accessible through user-friendly laboratory tests is a sign of massive demand that is not being met.
McKinsey has estimated the worth for its worldwide wellness industry as $1.5 trillion. In a further breakdown of the market, The management consulting firm reports that 50 percent of the wellness expenditure in the U.S. is focused on health. Business Insider’s research shows that $300 billion were invested in health and personal healthcare in 2015 by U.S. consumers 2015, and the industry was expected to see revenues of 350 billion in 2020. In the McKinsey report that 70% of the money spent on health and wellness within the U.S. was on consumer items, with the remaining being spent on services. If the percentage of money spent on services versus products is the same for each wellness spending subcategory, an acceptable estimate for the present U.S. consumer health product market is $245 billion. The demand for consumers is an efficient solution for their own health-related needs.
Zamani and Demiralp have developed a simple online platform that allows consumers to select the best lab kits, be checked, and present their results on a virtual dashboard. The well-designed shop-to-dashboard workflow lets customers gather quick data about their health and make changes to improve their overall health through lifestyle adjustments. Fitnescity provides individual health and wellness tests and an array of lab tests that evaluate different indicators concerning health, nutrition, and performance. The company’s relationships with numerous testing facilities allow the company to process samples from users on a large scale and provide results quickly.
Kennard says, “My favorite thing about Fitnescity is their high-quality standards. They have partnered with some of the most prestigious hospitals, physicians, and offices across the nation with more than 160 locations and expanding. This is great for me since that I travel extensively. I want to know that I can travel anywhere within the country and still receive the same service. Another thing I enjoy is the results dashboard. I’ve had several labs performed during college and professionally in the NFL; however, the results aren’t presented in a way that I truly understand or in a format/way I can go back and check on myself in completing overtime. I don’t want to visit the doctor to find out what my lab results mean. I want to be able to glance at it and review at any point in time, and Fitnesscity has enabled me to be able to do that.”
The most exciting value-added feature of the company is its digital dashboard that is in-house. Fitnescity could be thought of as an enterprise that is vertically integrated and manages all phases of the lifecycle of consumer data. However, they don’t make the lab kits or control them. It is an aggregator of these essential services, maximizing their benefits through their dashboard, which gathers the data, organizes it, and then presents results in an easy-to-use format. The dashboard functions as a moat to connect the advantages of Fitnescity as a laboratory test aggregator and a provider of analytics on personal health data. Without Fitnescity, customers cannot transfer their health information elsewhere or access a range of tests in one location. With a strong team in place to improve their product, Fitnescity has the potential to become a multi-billion-dollar business.
Zemrani’s and Demiralp’s backgrounds enable them to build a strong product that is a thriving market. Zemrani’s LinkedIn page, Zemrani studied engineering and management at Telecom ParisTech and obtained her MBA at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She was a first-time employee of Dataxis before joining Fitnescity. Demiralp received her Ph.D. at Brown University in Computer Science and was an invited research scientist at Columbia University and MIT. He was also an executive research scientist for Megagon Labs before launching Fitnescity together with Zemrani. With Fitnescity, customers can control their health and be aware of the state of their body better than were before with the ease of access to wellness and health tests and personal data analytics.
