Photo Credit: Songsak Chalardpongpun
Is CarePod the future of healthcare in the US? Investors seem excited by the prospect, but questions linger about its ability to provide proper care.
The following is a report and analysis of an article on AXIOS.com dated December 8, 2023.
The CarePod is described as an AI-powered “Doctor’s Office” and a “DIY health clinic-in-a-box.” It is being built, promoted, and touted as the replacement for primary care doctors in the USA. Investors love it; in fact, it just finished a $100 million capital raise.
Here’s how the CarePod pitch team explains its care model to angel investors:
- Subscribers pay $99 a month for network membership.
- They use an app to open CarePod’s door.
- Patients sit in the chair inside the pod and run through a series of healthcare apps—even one to draw blood!
- CarePod allows patients to conduct a biometric body scan, sequence their DNA, and perform tests for hypertension, kidney disease, and heart issues.
In the article, Adrian Aoun, founder and CEO of Forward, the company planning to install CarePods throughout the US, said, “If Elon has the self-driving car, well, this is the autonomous doctor’s office.”
He continued, “You’re never going to scale doctors and nurses to the whole planet, so instead of healthcare being a service, maybe we should rebuild healthcare as a product. Maybe we should take every single thing that doctors and nurses are doing and just slowly but surely try and migrate it over to hardware and software.”
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The Big Picture
“We’re just going to keep going until we can deliver all this awesomeness for pennies on the dollar for the whole planet,” said Aoun. Now, only four of these pods exist at the moment, and yet—as crazy as this all sounds—Forward just raised $100 million to build out this vision!
Imagine box-doctors like this in every health club, lining the walls of your local mall, at the library, maybe even next to your ATM at the bank—get your DNA sequenced and grab some cash for a night out in one stop.
You can smell the double standard, yes? Know that this nightmare vision is being funded by people who each have their private, fully human, flesh-and-blood physician on speed dial.
Is this a sign that the end is near? If today’s citizens accept this as adequate care, this article is the death knell of first-person, human-to-human healthcare delivery and the end of primary care medicine as we know it.
