Subscribe
Sign in
Forward ā Apple Store meets Doctor's office
27
Replies
Best
@kunalslab @adrianaoun Hey Kunal! I'm one of the cofounders at Forward. Thanks for the Qs.
1) Yes, definitely expecting multiple touchpoints in both directions. With our early test members, we see a lot of inbound via the app since we intentionally tried to make it as frictionless as possible to ask questions and follow-ups (think iMessage or Slack, but you're in a chat with a whole team of people who are your doctor + care team). We also reach out proactively based on what we know about you and the data that's coming back via Apple Health, etc. For example, if you have high cholesterol, we know that and will reach out from a nurse/nutritionist who can help advise you on diet change, but it's even better if we're feeding data into our system from something like a wifi scale so we can attach a metric to that goal and create alert triggers for your team to intervene if something doesn't look right.
2) The experience starts with what we call the "baseline", which is sort of like our version of an executive health screen where we proactively elicit everything that we can instrument about you and your health using the scanner, genetic testing, blood testing, etc. @leila_c did a great job describing it here: https://medium.com/@leilajanah/t... and we build off that baseline to manage your health after that via the app and the physical location.
3) Custom hardware is obviously tough and expensive, but we didn't see anything like that body scanner that we could have deployed off the shelf, so we built our own. I sort of think about it as a hardware platform for health sensors that will evolve over time. All the sensors in it are FDA approved
Fascinating! What about stuff like Xrays/imaging? Typically on lower end health plans they aren't covered at all and seems like a major gap for most people on an ACA health plan.
@allany888 Hey Allan, we do some imaging in-house (mostly ultrasound) and working on getting more integrated as we grow. The way I think about it, every time we send you out for something is a failure mode because we couldn't do it ourselves and had to send you back into the legacy system. So the goal is definitely to keep expanding scope until that needs to happen less and less often. Thanks for the Q!
@ilyaabyzov @allany888 what's the target price point your team is aiming to hit? For now, it's nearly as expensive as purchasing a second insurance plan.
@nkbuduma @allany888 For sure. Tough to say right now, but in an ideal world primary care is free. How close we get to that remains to be seen. When I started at Uber in July '12 I inherited a very expensive black car business and we were able to do a lot to take the price down massively via tech and operational efficiencies over time.
Forward is a new kind of healthcare company, a health membership, that gives you access to world-class doctors and new technology. Read more about what they're up to here š«
https://medium.com/goforward/hea...
Love the idea of meeting a doctor via the phone or digitally versus going into an office. Congrats on the launch!
I'm curious though, from a consumer perspective:
If I've got health insurance from my employer, what's the advantage here? It's gotta be a huge advantage to pay $149/month versus getting free healthcare from my employer. Can you give me some reasons I'd choose this over free healthcare?
@jmabeebiz Hey Justin, it's a pretty different experience vs. a traditional doctor. It's much more focused on ongoing, preventative health and health monitoring. We also don't bill your insurance, so you never have any co-pays or odd bills in the mail months later. Also working on making it less expensive over time as we use tech to create more leverage for our doctors.
What kinds of measurements do the body scanners and wearables make? Do you have metrics on how much time (and as proxy) that measurement automation saves?
@nkbuduma The scanner takes standard vital signs (pulse oximetry, pulse, temperature via thermal camera, etc.) as well as some newer measures of heart health like pulse wave height a la the new Withings scale. The wearables can do everything from blood glucose to blood pressure and heart arrhythmia.
An area painfully in need of disruption - I'm really looking forward to seeing how this rolls out, especially as you make your way towards Santa Cruz
So, the oversimplified goal here is to replace primary care, and to some extent traditional "urgent" care, with an all-in-one proactive solution? But, the care team would still work with traditional specialists, surgeons, etc. in cases of oncology or a burst appendix or what-have-you for things that fall outside of the specialties and capabilities of the facility/team?
This is very cool. Are you avoiding regulations such as Meaningful Use, MACRA, etc, by not taking in Payors/Medicare? Also, how are you able to cover your costs for such a low membership fee? Having worked in healthcare for some time now, 24/7 medical advice and guidance are not at all cheap to deliver. Especially when you have physicians, mid-levels, etc. This is radical and difficult to comprehend!
@adrianaoun @ilyaabyzov @robert_sebastian I thought this was an awesome service, so I wanted to try it out, but wasn't sure the price tag was right for me. I visited your guys' site though (gorgeous) and I asked the care team about the pricing before my baseline visit, and they told me that I should get the baseline visit before making a decision. So I did.
After the baseline visit and some thinking on my end about my budget (recent Stanford grad here), I decided I couldn't afford the $1800 price tag, so I asked for a refund. The manager then called me and said that I would get no refund whatsoever. I spent over 20 minutes on the line with him just trying to get a pro-rated refund of some sort, but even that was not possible. He then said that he had sole decision-making power over this and ended our conversation.
Was pretty surprised, since I expected better customer service, not something straight out of Comcast's playbook.
Please help?
@iamwillkim @ilyaabyzov @robert_sebastian Hey sir! Sorry to hear. shoot me an email adrian@goforward.com and we can dive in together.
If there is one area that is in desperate need of development, that's the medical sector. It's really great to see you guys coming up with what seems to be a very ambitious project which has the potential to be game-changing. But you've still got a really long way to go, so a big GOOD LUCK from me!
I'm curious how you're measuring your success? The trend in healthcare seems to be to minimize hospital visits and services, focusing on better outcomes instead. For the price, how do you see balancing patients wanting to get their money's worth (which might mean more visits and services) with better health outcomes (which might mean less visits and services).
Hi Product Hunters,
Iām the CEO and Founder of Forward. I was biking down to work a few years ago when I learned a close relative of mine had suffered a heart attack. What I saw while helping him recover would probably be obvious to most of you: that doctors lack the tools that we in the engineering world take for granted. There was a total lack of data-driven decision making and the experience as a consumer was really troubling.
With a few friends of mine from Google and Uber, we decided to try to go after the problem from first principles. We realized very quickly that defragmenting the world of healthcare would be impossible and that the underlying incentives were really twisted, so we ended up rebuilding everything in a āfull stackā way - weāre a software company, a hardware company, and we ourselves are the medical practice and employ physicians and nurses.
Hereās some of what we built:
- We built our own body scanner that rapidly gathers data about you and feeds it to your Forward doctor and to your phone, replacing the need for manually gathering vital signs by hand
- We do blood testing on-site and give you results within 12 minutes. That data is also captured in a structured way and attached to your health record
- Our doctors, who come from Stanford, Kaiser, Sutter, etc. work with you to build a plan incorporating your data and health goals. Thereās an app running on a screen inside the room that shows you whatās happening and helps you collaborate with the doctor
- Our app gives you 24x7 access to your doctor and a care team with doctors/nurses to answer questions and take care of follow-ups no matter where you are and what youāre up to
- We ingest data from any of your health connected devices via Apple Health / Google Fit so that we can keep an eye on your health on an ongoing basis if you want us to - our system uses all the structured data we gather to flag issues to you and your Forward care team
- Weāre direct-to-consumer and donāt bill insurance for anything that we do. Itās $149/month billed annually and that includes everything, so there arenāt any random charges/bills in the mail and our customers are people, not their insurance companies :)
Our first location is at 180 Sutter St. in SFās financial district. Weāre opening our doors today and would love to show you around if you want to swing by!
Let me know what questions you have about the tech or the product!
Adrian
@ggnall Thanks! We have fantastic designers from Uber and Frog working on the UI and the physical space itself.
@ilyaabyzov @ggnall really does look nice. Just a small thing, but could you get them to add a favicon and maybe some Open Graph meta tags. This will help continue the beauty when sharing it with others via iMessage etc š
@nagra__ Thanks! I do see a favicon on our page - not sure why that isn't showing up :( I'll work on the meta tags.
SlidesUp API