EXERCISE studios may sound like an unusual business for family doctors, but general practitioner (GP) chain Minmed Group has just opened two since end-2021, with about 3,000 users to date.
The expansion comes as founder, co-owner and chief executive Eric Chiam plans to build on the momentum from Covid-19 pandemic-related services, and pivot towards a national healthy lifestyle campaign.
Chiam wants to “see how we can improve or align our fitness and nutrition offerings a little bit better to the Healthier SG environment as it comes on stream”, he tells The Business Times (BT) from the private healthcare group’s latest clinic in Woodlands, in a reference to the ongoing strategic reform of Singapore’s healthcare centre announced by the Ministry of Health (MOH) in March.
Bumper revenue
Fitness and nutrition, as well as enhancing home care and hospital step-down care services, have been identified as key areas for growth, on top of ongoing GP care and health screening services.
That comes as the Covid-19 pandemic drove bumper revenue for Minmed, which offered vaccination services and both rapid and polymerase chain reaction testing, at its clinics and at sites under contract with the MOH.
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Turnover jumped to S$60.4 million in 2021, from S$13.6 million the year before, Minmed’s latest financial statements showed. Net profit swelled to S$10.9 million, from S$1.1 million in 2020.
The company, which was founded in 2015, is not expected to repeat this bonanza immediately.
Chiam discloses that the five-year topline forecast has taken into account both the high base effect from pandemic-related income, as well as startup costs needed to invest in business growth.
“Given the expansion in our clinic network, as well as in the ancillary suite of services that we are raising... we will probably suffer a short attrition in the near term,” he says.
“We will be back at our 2021 numbers in year three, and we’ll be able to surpass them in year five.”
The Minmed Connect App, launched in 2020, is a critical part of the company’s ambitions.
Chiam notes that the Covid-19 pandemic has boosted patient awareness of healthtech: “They have become a lot more receptive, for example, in teleconsulting a doctor, and having the medication delivered to them.”
In turn, he believes that Minmed has to move beyond “a singular service of teleconsultation within an app”.
He sees the introduction of the tech platform as a progression of earlier work “in the preventive health realm”, which already included health screenings, corporate health solutions, and fitness and nutrition classes”.
Services on the app now include health screening bookings and results. The next step is to make dietary and exercise plans available – all of which, Chiam says, can raise patients’ “touch points” with the company.
“Beyond Covid-19, we were looking at enlarging our health screening scope and services and the domains that we serve,” he adds, pointing to Minmed’s spin, Zumba, barre, yoga, and other fitness class offerings.
The group now has two studios, in Pearl’s Hill and Zion Road, which Chiam dubs “an offline extension of fitness in an environment that we can control” – including virtual workout streaming on the Minmed app.
When asked whether the expansion into exercise studios risks diluting the core business or overextending the company’s position, Chiam replies that “there is synergy, because I’m bringing you in, not just at facilitation level – registration, togetherness, cross-selling – but also at the results end”.
Healthy adults in their 30s and 40s may pay for both health screenings and gym memberships, but “no healthcare group has put the two together, because they’ve always stayed on very siloed tracks”, says Chiam, even as he argues that the verticals are “two layers of the same thing, called being well”.
“There must always be a core set of fitness assets, so that we can use them effectively for controlling the programming... and at the same time, we are able to be self-sufficient.”
Still, he is cautious about the pace of growth for the bricks-and-mortar fitness studios, which he says will eventually have to include a partnership network to widen geographical and service coverage.
He tells BT: “We are still in the phase of making sure that the offerings are gelling, and add upon the work that we do. So again, we look at it a little bit more judiciously when the time is right.”
Going places
The group began as a single clinic in Haig Road in 2001, where Chiam and his wife Lisa practised, and was renamed Minmed in 2015. Its footprint expanded from eight outlets before the Covid-19 pandemic, to 16 GP clinics, one screening centre and one dental clinic now, with four more clinics in the pipeline.
Minmed’s aim is to have 30 clinics locally by 2023, and Chiam says that “we are reasonably on track for that”, although he adds: “The important part is to make sure that we do not grow for the sake of growing, but remain judicious in where we want to site the clinics, such that we can really add value to the people we serve... We have to do it one step at a time, to make sure that we do not push into oversaturation.”
The enlarged clinic network is also expected to come on greenfield expansion, rather than acquisitions of rivals, as Chiam prefers the familiarity of “the format and the templates that we’re used to”.
“Of course, time and again, people do put deals across, but when we sit down to relook at it, we realise that it’s probably a lot easier to just identify the places that we want to be,” he says.
When asked whether the privately-held Minmed might consider taking on new investors, however, Chiam tells BT that “it’s something we will never say no to, at the end of the day”.
“We have to understand that it’s not going to be just staying in the primary healthcare world anymore. We will be developing further capabilities – in home care, specialist care, for example – and this is where, if we were to need help, let’s go,” he adds. “If it’s help that requires a strategic alliance, we’re not going to say no.”
He has also set his sights on overseas expansion with GP, health screening and telemedicine services.
Minmed is actively eyeing a foray into Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City, where Chiam is attracted by rising affluence and the share of young, working adults in the population.
Closer to home, Chiam is looking forward to opportunities from the government’s Healthier SG strategy, which was approved by parliament in October and is now kicking off in earnest.
The programme, which emphasises preventive healthcare, will lean on family doctors to enrol each Singapore resident at a single clinic, develop personalised health plans that feature regular health screenings and vaccinations, and boost chronic care for health issues.
Minmed already has experience participating in the Community Health Assist Scheme (Chas), which subsidises medical care for citizens at GP clinics, and the Public Health Preparedness Clinic (PHPC) scheme, where GPs help in public health emergencies such as the influenza and Covid-19 pandemics.
“We have benefited from it across many tiers,” Chiam says of public-private healthcare partnerships.
“With Healthier SG, the (public sector healthcare) clusters will be working with us very closely, and I look forward to that. At the same time, there are also preparations for us to be involved in step-down care, with the hospitals for example, and again, this reflects the increasing intimacy between private healthcare players and public institutions.”
Chiam is also unfazed by competition within the private healthcare sector, where MOH figures show that some 1,800 GP clinics meet an estimated 80 per cent of Singaporeans’ primary care needs.
“Within the private institutions, we are all part of an ecosystem,” he says. “Truth be told, the amount of healthcare need itself far overwhelms that of any single or big group in the private sector.”
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