Forward: Doctors that listen, empower and inspire.

Forward

Maker

Hi Product Hunters, I’m 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 “full stack” way - we’re a software company, a hardware company, and we ourselves are the medical practice and employ physicians and nurses. Here’s 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. There’s an app running on a screen inside the room that shows you what’s 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 you’re 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 - We’re direct-to-consumer and don’t bill insurance for anything that we do. It’s $149/month billed annually and that includes everything, so there aren’t 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 SF’s financial district. We’re 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

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8yr ago

Graham Gnall

Braavo

Well it sure looks gorgeous...

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8yr ago

Ilya Abyzov

Forward

Maker

@ggnall Thanks! We have fantastic designers from Uber and Frog working on the UI and the physical space itself.

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8yr ago

Crypterval

@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 😅

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8yr ago

Ilya Abyzov

Forward

Maker

@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.

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8yr ago

Kunal Bhatia

SlidesUp API

@adrianaoun first, congrats on the launch! I had a couple of questions: 1) You compare Forward to a health membership and are charging monthly. In my head, I'm equating this to an Equinox gym membership. Do you anticipate your patients having multiple touchpoints during a month with Forward? 2) What would the typical first month/year look like for a Forward member? 3) Building medical devices is hard and proving they are accurate takes data and time. What's your strategy for building custom hardware at Forward (e.g., body scanner)? Are you getting regulatory approvals? Thanks for tackling this problem, and I'm hoping your model becomes successful!

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8yr ago

Ilya Abyzov

Forward

Maker

@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

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8yr ago

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