New prescription: Doctor offices that look like Apple stores
SAN FRANCISCO—After a relative suffered a heart attack a few years ago, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Adrian Aoun got an unsettling look at a health-care system that he diagnosed as an inefficient and outdated mess.
Now he believes he has a remedy. It’s called Forward, a health-management service that charges a $149 per month— roughly $1,800 a year—to tend to all of its patients’ primary-care needs. And not just with attentive doctoring, either; Forward plans to deploy body scanners, sensors, giant touch-screen monitors, infrared devices and other hightech gizmos that could make a doctor’s appointment feel more like a trip to an Apple store.
“Doctors are super smart, but they are set up for failure in so many ways,” Aoun says. “We haven’t built the tools that they need to operate in modern life. No one wants to go to the doctor’s office today. We want to change that.”
NOT QUITE ALL-YOU-CAN-EAT
Forward will still refer patients to outside specialists when its primary-care doctors can’t deal with certain health problems; same goes for hospital admissions. And there are bound to be health insurance headaches that Forward isn’t attempting to address.
That means Forward is unlikely to become a cure-all, especially because its membership fee isn’t cheap, said Paul Ginsburg, a health-policy expert at the University of Southern California.
“Primary care is a very small part of the cost for what health insurance covers,” Ginsburg said. “So, even after paying nearly $2,000 a year, you are still going to have to buy health insurance to cover everything else.”
But Aoun is convinced his high-tech approach can start to make things better.
HIGH TECH PRIMARY MEDICINE
Forward’s patients can view all their medical information on a mobile app they can use to message a “care team” available around the clock. All blood and DNA tests are done at Forward’s offices instead of being farmed out; the company says patients will be able to review the results in a matter of minutes instead of days later.