By Danish Nagda and Jeff Gamble
Patients got unlimited visits to Forward’s tech-enabled primary clinics for a $150 monthly fee. The San Francisco-based startup had previously raised over $225M to scale this concept in 2021; and last year, went all-in on AI with its $100 million fundraise to deploy “AI doctors in a box” across the country in public spaces like malls and gyms. Within these futuristic-looking kiosks, patients could get biometric scans and other diagnostic assessments completed without the assistance of a clinical professional.
Upon the shutdown news, Business Insider spoke to 11 former Forward employees who said the CarePods didn’t interest patients like Forward hoped. The company spent millions on manufacturing and struggled with numerous technical issues, like the self-service blood draws routinely failing, and patients getting stuck in the pods.
The shutdown was abrupt. Forward’s website redirects to the company’s statement, and it seems patients don't have much guidance on what to do next.
So what happened?
Adrian Aoun, Forward’s CEO, wanted to shift healthcare away from the age-old “doctor first” approach and towards “technology first.” While his good intent was to create a new tool to arm doctors with more health data for better diagnoses and change a healthcare system that’s not working for anyone, the approach left patients as cold as an empty CarePod. Forward tried to productize healthcare, and in doing so, it inadvertently shifted it too far away from the human element.
On one hand, it makes sense. If your goal is to bring preventative healthcare to more people, software and hardware provides scale in a way that people cannot. But Forward missed the fact that healthcare is a service: not because it has to be, but because patients want it to be.
Instead, Forward took the path of removing humanity from healthcare in order to productize it. Products are elastic goods — meaning a change in price leads to a significant shift in demand. By its very nature, healthcare is an inelastic good — demand remains relatively constant even with changes in economic factors.
When someone you love is sick, you just want the problem fixed by the right person, and for somebody to tell you that it's going to be okay. Forward forgot the core premise that in healthcare, you need to start with warmth. Nobody likes going into a cold, empty room when they’re full of anxiety about their or their loved one’s health.
Technologists often lead the charge on new ideas before they spend the time listening, observing, and learning. Part of Forward’s downfall can be attributed to the culture of the tech industry it was born out of: “we know what you want before you know what you want”. But when someone hasn't been feeling well for years, they want an answer and they want to know that someone cares. You can't replace that with zeros and ones.
You can, however, augment it. Physician and futurist Eric Topol has spoken extensively about how healthcare will ultimately be provided by people who are augmented by AI, which will allow humans to bring even more humanity to the delivery. At Rezilient, we realized early-on that the core of great healthcare has to be the relationships with the people involved.
Technology is our chance to make healthcare more humane, if we take the right approach.
Technology should only exist in healthcare to enable clinicians to do what they do best. People need to talk to people. Patients want to feel and seen and heard. They want their problems solved by people who have the training to do a good physical exam, adapt to the information that they’re getting in real time, and adapt to the findings in real time.
Forward tried to replace the people with technology, and it didn’t fly. In reality, the big winner in this space is whoever makes people better with technology, enables people to scale with technology, and allows people to focus on the things that make a human interaction and relationship lasting, transparent, and forward-looking.
Find out more about Rezilient: a healthcare benefit that people love.
