Forward Health is a sideway step at best

Hey Adrian Aoun, CEO of Forward Health. Call me. I am a real live 4-year customer, client and patient of your chain of doctors offices, charging me a $150 monthly fee on top of my excellent insurance. Forward is tech-heavy, with gizmos and gadgets aplenty, whosits and whatsits galore. Yet no one seems to own a phone. Your doctors never call me, your nurses never call, your customer service never calls back. But will you delete me as a client or will you actually make the effort to better yourselves and your business. Even Joe Rogan knows how to apologize.

Can I mail you a quarter so you can use a payphone?

UPDATE: THERE ARE SO MANY CREDIT CARD CHARGING INCONSISTENCIES BEING REPORTED TO ME- LATER! There is an outpouring of unhappy customers I am fielding. I am surprised at my current interactions with Adrian, more later.

Since no one calls me, I’ll just write here on the Interwebs that your company, which is now valued at over $1 billion, is not very good. If you’re worth a billion dollars, you might want to ask yourself: how are you gonna heal millions of people? By when? And how will you measure it? Your tech is a facade, your clinics are understaffed, your client rolls are overbooked, and your online reviews are tanking. Everyone reading this article should ask the board members of this unicorn what in heck their motive is. You have nice wood paneling, though. Marc Benioff, your humble and humanitarian board member can’t tolerate your customer service, can he?

Is the plan just a quick ramp-up and a fat exit? Looks that way. Forward’s ads are plastered all over YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. (And how many days in a row are you going to assault me with ads saying “limited time offer of $99, ends tomorrow”?) Your clinics have the tall windows and iPads of an Apple Store with a “body scanner” that looks like a teleporter and full-wall computer monitors that look like Captain Kirk’s or the matrix which never really existed.

· · ·But we live in the age of spin. Everyone on TikTok is sticking out their chins and sucking in their guts. Millions of 50-year-olds without jowls.· · ·

This fakery is bad enough when we’re talking about Instagram influencers. It’s not OK for companies that claim to be in health care. Forward is photoshopping out its flaws like a Kardashian.

Flesh and blood can’t be fixed with a filter.

Forward’s whole gig is trying to replace humans with tech; to have routine parts of care automatized and outsourced to an app.

Hey Adrian Aoun, CEO of Forward Health. Call me. A real live four-year customer, client, and patient of your chain of doctor's offices, charging $150 monthly on top of excellent insurance.

The body scan pod glows blue in the waiting room. It looks like something from a Ridley Scott film — sleek, confident, expensive. The AI analyzes your vitals in ninety seconds. The screen displays your results in a font that communicates: we are the future of healthcare. Then you wait. And wait. And no one calls. No doctor. No nurse. No human being with a stethoscope and the basic decency to follow up on the results their own machine generated.

Forward Health has built a billion-dollar company on the thesis that technology can replace the physician relationship. The body scan is impressive. The genetic screening is thorough. The app is beautiful. And none of it matters if no one picks up the phone when the results come back abnormal. Technology without human connection is not healthcare. It's a diagnostic vending machine with a subscription fee.

The structural critique is this: Forward has optimized for the wrong metric. They've reduced the cost of data collection to near zero while allowing the cost of human follow-up to approach infinity. The result is a system that knows everything about your body and does nothing with the knowledge. Data without action is not medicine. It's surveillance.

Four years of data. Zero proactive phone calls. The future of healthcare should probably include a telephone.