By Drew Ianni
March 8, 2021
Forward Aims to Put ‘Health’ Back in Healthcare
At the recent CDX Accelerate conference, CDX Founder & GM Drew Ianni spoke to Rob Sebastian, co-founder and head of strategy at Forward – a pioneering firm dedicated to transforming health care. “We are putting the ‘health’ back in health care”, Sebastian said as he discussed how he and a colleague of his at Google X – Google’s in-house moonshots lab – decided to embark on this journey six years ago.
Healthcare At The Limit – A Problem of Informatics
Sebastian said the current U.S. healtcare system actually focuses on “sick care.” Forward’s goal, by contrast, is to transform the system by helping patients not get sick in the first place and then to proactively manage any chronic diseases they do have. The company’s subscription-based service provides access to Forward-branded clinics and doctor-guided lifestyle programs that are designed to encourage a healthy lifestyle for the patient. He takes a fundamentally optimistic view of where U.S. healthcare is going: “Few people have internalized that healthcare is going to be massively better in our lifetimes because healthcare at the limit is an informatics problem.”
Accelerating The Product Roadmap
During the pandemic, he said, the company’s core mission and value proposition has remained the same, but it “massively accelerated.” He continued: ”We’re now able to leap three and five years down the product roadmap.”
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