Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Force Therapeutics CEO Bronwyn Spira (Part 1)

Bronwyn discusses a critical aspect of telehealth that is seeing significant adoption in the Covid era.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to FORCE Therapeutics.

Bronwyn Spira: I’m the Founder and CEO of Force Therapeutics. I started my career as a physical therapist treating patients and helping them recover from injury and surgery. I’ve spent 25 years in various clinical settings. I ran the Rusk Institute at NYU Medical Center.

I founded Force 10 years ago to help patients that had challenges similar to what I was seeing in my own practice and really help them be digitally connected to their provider and lead them towards positive recovery. 

Sramana Mitra: Tell us what, specifically, is the solution that you offer.

Bronwyn Spira: It’s a digital healthcare platform that connects patients and providers when they’re apart. We have multiple components including video-based exercise programs or what we call Virtual Rehab. We have a navigation platform. That helps providers navigate their patients through an episode of care.

We connect multiple data points including patient-reported outcome measures, pain, and range of motion. Because we have so much data in our platform, we also feed back to our providers a lot of data and analytics so they can veer themselves towards evidence-based care design. We also integrate all of our data into EHRs. 

Sramana Mitra: What is the primary business of Force?

Bronwyn Spira: The primary business is to help patients recover over an episode of care and help providers deliver care in a digital and virtual format, which helps them ultimately collect data, save money, and control the outcomes of their patients. 

Sramana Mitra: Who is your customer?

Bronwyn Spira: We sell to large epidemic medical centers and community hospitals. Basically hospitals and provider groups. 

Sramana Mitra: Is it a SaaS model?

Bronwyn Spira: Yes, but we do have a services component where we help implement the platform. We stand it up and customize the system for each provider organization. Then we are their background support. Once we set up the platform, it’s a pure SaaS model. We sell seat licenses.

Sramana Mitra: A company that we’ve covered extensively is WebPT. Is that your competitor?

Bronwyn Spira: WebPT is more of an electronic medical record for physical therapy practices. We typically sell into orthopedics and surgery practices in health systems. The EHR is basically a system of records whereas we consider ourselves as a system of engagements.

We are able to engage that patient when they’re outside of the health system in multiple different ways. We don’t just collect medical records; we guide patients through recovery. We’re patient-facing but provider-prescribed.

Sramana Mitra: If a provider prescribes using your system, is it a battery of physiotherapy exercises that are digitally delivered?

Bronwyn Spira: It’s very holistic though. Physical therapy with a virtual rehab is only one of the multiple components. The other component includes education. For example if you’ve had a total knee replacement, your care team may need to monitor how your incision is healing.

We’ll provide information on how to care for that wound and then also have patients deliver photographs or videos of how they are doing it at home. It’s a holistic recovery platform with physical rehab being a piece of it. A big component is also the education piece.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Force Therapeutics CEO Bronwyn Spira
1 2 3 4