Neko, the full-body scanning startup cofounded by Spotify’s Daniel Ek, is trying to rethink health care by focusing on data-rich analyses and preventive care. To show how different this is from traditionally reactive health care services, the company has made the design of its clinics just as important as the scanning and diagnostics it performs.
This approach is on display at the company’s newest clinic, now open in New York City’s Soho neighborhood. With gently lit rooms, spare walls, and soft splashes of pastels, the clinic and its waiting area have a minimal and futuristic feel that blends a high-end spa with a fashion boutique.
Neko has been operating clinics since 2003, and has performed more than 100,000 of its $499 radiation-free scans. The company, which just pulled $700 million in series C fundraising, is looking at the New York clinic as its first step into the U.S. market, with other planned locations in Miami, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.
The design of the clinic was led by Franquibel Lima, an architect and former global head of WeWork’s design studios, who has been involved in designing Neko’s other clinics in cities like Stockholm, London, and Manchester, England. He says Neko’s clinics are different from traditional healthcare environments partly because they’re not geared around treating sick patients, but also because the company sees more value in treating people before they become sick patients. “For us to move from reactive healthcare into proactive healthcare, it requires a real mindset shift,” Lima says.
Convincing people there can be another way of approaching healthcare, Neko has tried to make its clinics feel more like an experience than a cattle call. “If you think about traditional healthcare, it’s typically cluttered. You have posters on the wall like here’s your skeleton, and it’s all about the average person,” Lima says. “But we now have the technology to be able to be very personal and very individual.”
Drawing inspiration from Apple stores and science fiction films, Neko’s New York clinic combines carefully controlled lighting with a palette of soft and natural materials. At the street level, the storefront is a simple door emanating an amber glow. Inside, you walk down a brushed stainless steel stairwell into a white-walled waiting area, where a small greeting podium leads to a plush U-shaped seating area. Fluted wall coverings with backlighting give a cloudlike feel to the space, and underlighting beneath the seats adds to the sense of floating.
Leaving the waiting area and heading into the all-white clinical area, the lighting brightens and guides visitors into one of the six scanning areas. Through their doorways, pastel yellow lights and paint emerge from the scanning room, emitting what Lima says is a calming tone. “We look at lighting not as an overlay to materials and finishes. We look at lighting as almost like a building component,” he says. “It’s a multisensorial experience that really prepares you to know more about your health.”
As a premium service that’s intended to be complementary to primary care and other traditional health care services, Neko can afford to put these extra design touches into its clinics. But the company has ambitions of becoming a bigger part of the way people stay healthy and catch problems before they snowball. Creating spaces people will want to visit again and again is integral to that approach.
“Because we are a consumer brand, because we believe that consumers are the ones that drive change typically, instead of trying to do it through policy, then it’s really important that we create environments where people walk into and think this doesn’t feel like anything else that I felt before,” Lima says.