AI doctor's office coming to Chandler Fashion Center
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Forward's CarePod stand-alone doctor's office. Photo: Courtesy of Forward
Now coming to a mall, gym or office building near you: A self-contained doctor's office, powered by artificial intelligence, where you — the patient — draw your own blood and take your own vitals.
Why it matters: The traditional annual checkup is being disrupted in various tech-heavy ways, from telehealth to concierge medicine to the CarePod, a DIY health clinic-in-a-box.
Driving the news: A company called Forward is installing CarePods around the country, with the hope that people will visit them regularly for preventative care and specific concerns. One of the first will open at Chandler Fashion Center early next year.
- After buying a $99-a-month subscription, a patient uses their phone to unlock the door, sits in the chair inside and runs through a series of health apps.
- Patients can do a biometric body scan, have their DNA sequenced and test for hypertension, kidney disease and heart issues, among other things.
- Results are reviewed by offsite doctors, or patients can talk to a doctor virtually while they're inside the CarePod.
When asked how patients would draw their own blood inside a CarePod, founder and CEO Adrian Aoun whipped out a small vacuum chamber that suctioned to his upper arm and siphoned out a small sample.
- "In two to four minutes, this starts to fill up with blood," he said. "There's no needle, there's no knife, and nothing hurts right now."
- Aoun, who is not a doctor, called the device a "capillary blood draw" and made comparisons to a "leech or hickey."
What they're saying: Aoun sees the CarePod as a way to get basic health care services deployed broadly, despite global shortages of health care professionals.
- "You're never going to scale doctors and nurses to the whole planet," he said. "So instead we said, 'Maybe we should rebuild health care as a product.'"
Reality check: Forward doesn't take insurance, and $99 each month is a big ask for an untested concept. (Aoun says he's aiming to get the price way down.)
- Telemedicine is full of potential ethical and logistical pitfalls.
- Some people might worry about entrusting their care to such an unorthodox system and might wonder whether something important would get missed.