Surveying The Explosion in New Healthy Longevity Clinics

Each week brings me news of another healthy longevity clinic – or chain of clinics - being started or planned. This begins to feel like a major trend or even a movement. While positive for clinicians and clients, it prompts several questions I aim to address. Your insights on the following are welcomed:

Firstly, what is best – (a) to build on an existing private clinic, with its locations, staff and clientele, or (b) start afresh? I see both models. The pros and cons are fairly obvious – (a) is faster out of the gate, and brings clients immediately, but it also requires fresh marketing and perhaps branding, and those bringing the healthspan dimension will often be sharing ownership and management with the founders of the existing clinic. I recently spoke to a group in New York doing both at the same time, so I must catch up with them to see which approach is working best.

A second quite fundamental question is the product/market strategy. Here is a little diagram to explain what I mean:

Lots of Choices for Healthy Longevity Clinics

There’s a big difference between a clinic focused on high physical and mental performance for hitech entrepreneurs and one that seeks to keep the middle-aged happy with their looks and attractive to their partners. Everything, from branding and facility design to the selection of personnel will depend on this.

From that, of course, follows the specific treatments on offer: the more complex equipment needed, the more capital cost and staff training required, and the greater need to ensure good utilisation of the equipment’s capacity. And of course, also whether to offer advanced therapies, like stem cell therapy, exosomes, etc: these require very specialist administration, as well as knowledge of where best to source them. They are much less straightforward than ordering drugs or vitamins. Supplier quality, consistency of materials, and ensuring cold chain distribution where necessary, are vital for both effectiveness and client safety.

Skilled healthspan clinicians will typically have good answers to most of these questions, but successful clinics must be successful businesses not just top-quality healthcare facilities. My observation is that much less common than clinical expertise are the skills to manage operations, maintain local regulatory compliance, ensure smooth client relationships and communications, install and maintain IT systems, and procure materials cost-effectively and price intelligently. There is little or no education on these vital issues in most clinical curricula.

So the new generation of clinics needs to source skills and advice on many dimensions if they are to be as effective as businesses as they are appealing to their clients. I’m working on the best way to support clinics in these areas: some clinics will want to bring in consultancy, but others may value outsourcing services entirely, so they can focus on their clients and their clinical practice.

One final question arises from this fast growth in the clinic population. How does the field achieve the maximum advantage from these many new clinicians, clients and treatments to learn what works best, when practices and data systems vary from clinic to clinic? Conventional disease-focused medicine has its randomised controlled clinical trials, often involving thousands of patients, all treated identically, with outcome data captured and analysed consistently. We need to decide how healthspan treatments – especially the more advanced ones - accumulate evidence so that the field learns as it develops. This will not happen automatically – each clinic will acquire its own evidence in its own format, but unless we create a common evidential infrastructure we will never be able to make substantiated claims based on sufficient numbers of clients and treatments. I welcome your thoughts about how this infrastructure can be built.