Forward Health

» see goforward.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

i missed forward entirely. it was a us-only concept from the start, a monthly-subscription doctor's office that never existed as an option for anyone with a turkish address. what i knew about it came from us health-tech press in the 2022-2024 window, when the carepod idea started getting weird enough to write about.

adrian aoun was an ex-googler who had run alphabet's sidewalk labs group and left in the mid-2010s to build what he described as the ios of primary care. the model was ninety-nine dollars a month for unlimited visits to a forward clinic. the clinics themselves were designed to look nothing like a doctor's office. wall-mounted screens replaced clipboards. every touch surface tracked biometrics through the visit. the pitch to investors was that traditional primary care was labor-bottlenecked and forward would remove enough of the labor to make the subscription math work.

the first clinics opened in san francisco and by '19 forward had physical locations across a handful of major us cities. the november '23 hundred-million-dollar round was the pivot. instead of more clinics forward would ship carepods, glass-walled self-service kiosks the size of a photo booth that a patient stepped into alone. the pod would take blood pressure and other vitals, run a self-service blood draw, connect to a remote doctor by video. aoun's press interviews at launch treated the pods as the way primary care scales to a billion people.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the pitch ~

the language forward used was silicon valley language. aoun would talk about primary care the way a founder talks about a new phone. the carepods were designed by industrial designers whose portfolios included tesla interior work. the app looked cleaner than any traditional healthcare app on the store. the subscription framing was borrowed from consumer software rather than health insurance. all of that was the point, aoun's argument was that healthcare had to look and feel like a modern product before it could scale.

~ the decline ~

the problem showed up almost immediately after the pods went live. the self-service blood draw did not work reliably. patients reported it failing several attempts in a row before producing a usable sample. the automated door mechanism jammed with patients still inside on more than one occasion. remote doctors were seeing fewer patients than the projections required for the subscription math to work. the fixed cost of shipping and installing a carepod ran into six figures. the throughput per pod ran into single digits per day. by mid-2024 the internal numbers were nowhere close to breakeven and staff at the clinics were being told the pod expansion had taken priority over the clinics they still ran.

~ what remains ~

the november 12 shutdown was abrupt. aoun told staff that a funding round he had lined up would not close, so operations would stop immediately. every scheduled patient visit was canceled by end of day. clinics locked their doors. the pods that had been shipped to sponsor locations were pulled offline. aoun himself moved on to a new venture within weeks, which is a whole other story about how founders in the us health-tech segment cycle through cap tables faster than the products can be judged.

the wider read on forward is that it belongs on the shortlist with theranos and haven for consumer health-tech companies that raised silicon-valley-scale money on a silicon-valley-shaped promise and could not survive contact with how healthcare actually gets delivered. forward was less dishonest than theranos and less politically neutered than haven. it still lost four hundred million dollars trying to prove that a doctor's office could be redesigned around a subscription and a kiosk. the answer, in november '24, was that it could not.

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