---
title: "Counting the competitors: how to size a city's clinic market"
description: "The number you want is not the city's population. It is the gap between demand inside a drive time ring and the capacity already standing in it."
date: "2026-09-04"
updated: "2026-09-16"
topic: "Competitive intelligence"
canonical_url: "https://rolstonpaul.com/writing/counting-the-competitors-sizing-a-citys-clinic-market"
author: "Rolston Paul"
reading_time: "7 min read"
---

# Counting the competitors: how to size a city's clinic market

Author: Rolston Paul. Rolston Paul is an Operations Head based in New Delhi, India, focused on medical tourism and aesthetic medicine operations, writing about the clinical governance, patient coordination and operating standards India needs to earn international trust.
Published: 2026-09-04
Updated: 2026-09-16
Canonical: https://rolstonpaul.com/writing/counting-the-competitors-sizing-a-citys-clinic-market
Topic guide: https://rolstonpaul.com/topics/competitive-intelligence

The number you want is not the city's population. It is the gap between demand inside a drive time ring and the capacity already standing in it.

To size a local clinic market, draw a travel time ring around the site you are considering, count every provider already operating inside that ring together with the capacity they actually hold, estimate annual demand from the population inside the ring multiplied by how often people really buy the procedure, then subtract the capacity that already exists. The number you want is the gap. A city's population is not a market. It is a headline.

I would avoid building a city forecast by repeatedly taking a share of a national headline number. Start with the actual service area, the competing capacity and the patient group the clinical team can support. Write down the uncertainty rather than hiding it in several neat percentages.

The bottom up count is slower and looks worse on a slide. It is also the only version that survives contact with the first two quarters. This matters because a clinic opened on a headline number carries its costs before it fills its diary. For an overseas patient, the risk is a service promised before the city can support it. A count you can defend protects the operator and the patient.

When I assess an Indian city for aesthetic medical tourism, the local catchment is only one part of the model. I would separately test airport access, suitable recovery accommodation, clinician availability and the capacity to support patients after departure. Overseas enquiries are not interchangeable with local demand. A market entry decision needs a costed service for each group.

## Draw the ring before you count anything

Travel time, not distance. Distance flatters you because it ignores a river, a level crossing and the school run.

I would test the travel-time assumption with local enquiry patterns and patient feedback. A routine appointment and a planned overseas procedure may have very different catchments. Use a range and explain what evidence would justify expanding it.

So draw two. A primary ring at twenty to twenty five minutes, measured at the hour patients actually travel, which is a Tuesday at six in the evening and not a Sunday morning. A secondary ring at forty five to sixty. Elective, high value, once in a lifetime work pulls further than routine work does, so decide which one you are selling before you draw anything.

## Count the supply on foot

Directory listings are wrong within a quarter. Half of what you find is closed, and the providers that matter most are often single doctor practices that never registered anywhere you thought to look.

Here is the whole method. I call it the catchment census, and it takes one afternoon in a car and two evenings of phone calls.

For every provider inside the primary ring, record six things:

1. Address, and the real drive time from your candidate site at the hour patients travel. 2. Treatment rooms or chairs. Not staff headcount. Rooms are the ceiling. 3. Doctor sessions per week genuinely on offer, taken from a public booking page rather than a brochure. 4. Published price for three benchmark procedures you also intend to sell, obtained the way any member of the public would obtain it. 5. Ownership type: independent, group, or a hospital outpatient arm. 6. The date you last verified all of the above.

That fifth column predicts how a competitor reacts to your opening far better than their size does. An independent absorbs a new entrant slowly. A hospital outpatient arm can drop price on a Monday and hold it for a year.

Nothing here is clever and none of it needs a subscription.

## Turn the count into chairs

Now do the arithmetic in units you can actually staff.

Existing capacity is rooms multiplied by sessions per week multiplied by patients per session multiplied by weeks worked. Take the session and patient figures from your own clinics, because you know what those numbers really are and no published source does.

Demand is the population inside the ring, filtered down to the age and income band that buys, multiplied by an annual treatment rate you take from your own conversion history rather than from a prevalence study. Prevalence tells you who has the condition. Conversion tells you who pays.

As a cross-check, I would compare the proposed patient group with the service capacity that is actually accessible to it. Keep the assumptions visible: appointment availability, clinical scope, travel time and the completeness of the competitor count. A ratio can expose an implausible forecast, but it cannot establish demand or clinical suitability.

> You are not sizing demand. You are sizing the gap between demand and the capacity already standing.

## Concentration tells you what fight you are in

As a supplementary description, an analyst can calculate a concentration measure by squaring market shares and adding them. The result depends on the market definition and the shares used. I would not import a foreign merger threshold as a rule for opening an Indian clinic; the local commercial and legal questions need their own assessment.

You are not filing a merger. Borrow the arithmetic anyway, because it answers a question a share table cannot. A low index means many small providers and a fight decided by operations, consistency and appointment availability. A high index means two or three serious rivals who will notice you within a month and can respond on price before you have filled a diary. Same city, same population, entirely different plan.

## Three ways this number goes wrong

Test whether the proposed catchment describes patients who can realistically use this service. A few people travelling a long distance do not establish that everyone inside a wider ring has the same willingness or ability to travel. Keep the local and international assumptions separate.

Counting registrations instead of capacity. A licensed provider running one afternoon a week is not a competitor. Rooms and sessions, always.

Treating the answer as a forecast. It is a ceiling. What you win inside it is a separate argument about price, staffing and how quickly you answer the phone.

## What the number is actually for

Sort it into two lists before you present it.

Not yours: the population of the city, its income distribution, what the regulator does next, whether two rivals merge, whether a hospital opens an outpatient unit two streets away in month seven. None of that responds to your effort, and analysis of it produces slides rather than decisions.

Yours: the ring you choose to draw and whether you draw it honestly, the quality of the count, how often you refresh it, the capacity and price you bring, and whether you have the nerve to walk away from a market you have already spent three months studying. The same discipline matters for India's medical travel market. An overseas patient cannot check a city's capacity from abroad, so the count has to be honest before the service is offered to them. A market sized that way is one India can promise and keep.

The market size is weather. The count is work. Do the work, refresh it every quarter, and let the number be smaller than you hoped, because a small number you can defend is worth considerably more than a large one nobody can check.

## Questions people ask

### How do you size a local clinic market?

Define the patient group and the service area, then estimate demand and existing capacity using explicitly stated assumptions. I would separate domestic care from international medical travel and test the travel-time range against actual enquiry patterns. Keep uncertainty visible; a city population or national growth forecast does not establish demand for one clinic.

### How large is a clinic's realistic catchment area?

A realistic catchment depends on the procedure, access, patient group and the service around the appointment. I would use a range supported by local evidence rather than a universal journey time. International patients need a separate model that includes assessment, travel coordination, recovery arrangements and support after returning home.

### How do you tell whether a local clinic market is already crowded?

Compare demand assumptions with the capacity competitors can actually deliver, and state the limits of the information. A concentration measure can describe shares but cannot decide the entry case. I would examine clinical staffing, service differences, costs and the response the proposed clinic can sustain, with legal questions assessed by qualified advisers.

---

Contact: info@rolstonpaul.com