Kensho Health has launched a directory and information service for holistic medicine.
The Los Angeles-based start-up which is backed up by an academic publisher Wiley, as well as the latest information on holistic treatments from trusted sources, targets to serve up a verified list of local holistic medicine practitioners. The two founders and their team, gathered a group of healthcare providers hailing from Stanford University, Harvard University, Columbia University and others.
Steiner said, “We have six points of verification,” he added, “We look at accreditation, experience, peer reviews, customer reviews, we speak to the providers themselves to make sure we’re on the same page of what we’re trying to provide and for premier providers we do a background check.”
Wellness is an unclear term often representing therapies with questionable clinical value, is a huge business in the U.S. and around the world. Some reports says, industry organizations like the Global Wellness Institute put the dollar value of the industry at roughly $4.2 trillion, encompassing everything from medical tourism to personalized and complementary medicine.
According to the reports, the complementary medicine component alone is a $360 billion market opportunity and it’s there that the founders, Berlincourt and Steiner are focusing attention.
Berlincourt expressed, “We wanted to create something that acted at the right point of intervention.” Berlincourt, a former public relations professional who launched the business after turning to holistic medicine to treat her chronic adrenal failure.
She added, “So we curated a provider network and made [complementary medicine] easy to understand through research.”
The company encourages providers on its platform to offer their services on a sliding scale to improve accessibility and ensure that “this isn’t only for the wealthy elite,” says Berlincourt.
While the service is currently free, both Berlincourt and Steiner say there are obvious paths to making money that the company will explore after it builds out a solid base of users. Various potential revenue streams involve selling treatment or instructional packages or charging for listings on the site.