Tune in to this interview as Dana Luisier, Head of Marketing, sits down with Bronwyn Spira, CEO & Co-Founder, to discuss how Force Therapeutics supports care teams in reducing costs, improving patient outcomes, and preventing burnout through proactive, patient-centered technology.
What You’ll Learn:
- How Force aligns with healthcare providers to optimize surgical recovery workflows
- The impact of multimodal communication tools, from pre-op education to post-op follow-up
- How Force empowers clinicians to remotely monitor patient recovery while ensuring compliant PROMs collection rates
- Why patient engagement drives better outcomes, reduces complications, and cuts costs
- How Force leverages over 165 peer-reviewed studies to back its clinical efficacy
With a mission to keep patients at the center of care, Force Therapeutics offers a comprehensive, intelligent care plan that engages patients throughout their recovery journey while scaling provider impact.
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Transcript:
Hi. I'm Dana Luisier, head of marketing at Force Therapeutics.
If you're new to Force or wondering how we help health care providers improve patient outcomes while reducing staff burden, this is the perfect place to start. I'm sitting down today with our CEO and cofounder, Bronwyn Spira, to walk through how we support hospitals, health systems, and ASCs in delivering better surgical care at scale. So, Bronwyn, let's kick things off. Can you tell us a bit about what Force Therapeutics does and why it matters to health care providers right now?
Clinicians at hospitals, health systems, and ASCs are all working to improve patient outcomes and reduce overall cost of care. And at Force, we speak with providers across the country. And the one thing that is always clear to us is that their mission is our mission, which is to keep the patients at the center of their care.
So they're really striving to deliver high quality outcomes through engagement, education, and they have to also think through and meet regulatory requirements, all at the same time as protecting their care teams from burning out, while they're juggling all of these different competing challenges. And it's a really tough balance to strike. But with the right digital care model, one that's truly patient centric, it is actually possible to achieve all of these goals.
As a clinician myself, I've witnessed firsthand how digital tools can really help manage patients efficiently and effectively in order to bend that cost curve, while at the same time enhancing the patient experience and their clinical outcomes. So, at Force we work with hospital executives, administrators, quality leaders, navigators, surgeons, the whole care team, and hospital team really to deliver operational efficiency and quality improvement initiatives.
Our platform and solution is extremely comprehensive. So we think about managing patients from preparing them, getting them ready for surgery, knowing all they need to know, all the way through full recovery, to achieve the overarching mission, which is to improve the patient's experience and their ultimately improve their outcomes with clinically validated remote care.
So can you elaborate a bit more on how this all works in practice?
Absolutely. So, you know, Force enables multimodal bidirectional communication between patients and their own provider care team.
And so we reach patients wherever they are and enable them to connect with their own clinicians, their own care providers.
And to scale those providers, we use videos, educational videos, exercise videos that really help patients understand exactly what they need to do to have a successful outcome.
So some examples include things like educating them on how to care for their wound after a surgery, providing those virtual PT exercises so that they can get started the minute they get home from surgery and they're feeling up to it.
We also digitize those vital questionnaires about their recovery, which they can then answer at home and the clinicians back at the hospital can view and review, to get a, you know, a view of how their patients are really doing when they're outside of the four walls of the hospital.
So I think about Force as an extension beyond the four walls of the hospital and the platform that allows those care teams to reach out into the patient's home and empathetically wrap their arms around those patients throughout their care journey.
I think an important point here is that Force was created by clinicians like myself who deeply understand patients' needs and anxiety around their recovery challenges.
And we really tackled the issues around what patients need to engage, understand their care, understand what they need to do, but do it in a way that's meaningful meaningful for the patient, personalized so every piece of information or education they're receiving is for them specifically, and that it is a longitudinal journey.
So we want them to understand that starting a recovery journey isn't just you're in and you're out and you're done.
This is really a longitudinal journey to a successful outcome.
And, you know, there's a lot of learnings over the past fifteen years that we've been in this space. We've really become experts in understanding how to engage patients in their care.
We use data from the platform, from our, interactions with seeing patients interact with their care teams through the platform to deeply understand and incorporate, the things that we know motivate patients to comply with their treatment. And similarly, what could lead them to disengage.
And I feel like this is really what sets Force apart from our competitors, many of whom are not clinician led or patient centered.
We want to, at Force, always think about the patient's real world challenges and respond to their evolving recovery needs and drive them to successful outcomes.
So we know and we've done a lot of research on this topic that educated engaged patients have better functional outcomes.
Those patients that are educated and and accountable for their own care have a higher satisfaction with their care.
They reenter the workforce. They return to their normal lives quicker and happier.
And, you know, I think of the byproduct of that is really that these patients are less costly to the health system, because they tend to have fewer complications, fewer readmissions, and fewer high cost events that drive the cost of care up.
Taking all of that a layer deeper and really, you know, digging into the patient's experience, how do you know that patients are actually following the at home program that's been prescribed to them? And what about the patients that may not be very tech savvy or open to receiving education in this digital format?
Absolutely. And, you know, I can answer this question with data.
Ninety percent of patients that are given the opportunity to use the Force solution opt in.
And that ninety percent opt in rate remains extremely high throughout their engagement with Force because what happens is that Force becomes almost like synonymous with their care team as a trusted resource that they can refer back to throughout their care journey.
And during that time they come in and they review their exercises. They look at their care instructions. They interact with their care teams through messaging.
They complete their surveys. So the interaction is very rich and very, rewarding for the patients themselves.
And so, you know, we look at a number of different metrics to understand engagement. One of them is, we ask patients how prepared did you feel for your surgery after having been through that pre op, preparation process.
And ninety five percent of our patients actually report feeling that they are very prepared for their surgery.
So we we track every interaction, every touch point.
And this actually creates an order trail for the clinicians at the point of care and they can understand how well their patients are engaging.
If they see somebody dropping off through that order trail, they can act accordingly. But importantly, they don't have to do that for every single patient.
This is a scale mechanism for them to actually reach out to those patients that need them the most.
And so we really think about it as a partnership with our customers and our partners.
You know, we wanna enable them to, educate and engage every patient that is getting surgery or who is under their care.
And they do truly understand that an ongoing patient engagement, loop is actually key to driving those high outcomes for their patients.
And to expand on that final point you just made, one of the things we spend a lot of time on talking about here at Force is the patient engagement and the positive downstream impact it has on PROMS collection. Can you speak to that a bit more, overall and Force's thought process around this?
Absolutely. You know, as you know and a lot of people listening here may understand is that it is now mandated for all hospitals to collect these specific forms and surveys, patient reported outcome surveys.
And CMS has mandated that those are collected before they go for the surgery and then again one year after. And those two forms have to match. So from the same patient, we need to match a pre op and a one year form.
Typically, hospitals don't struggle too much with that pre op form. The patients are coming for pre admission testing and they are, you know, deeply engaged in getting to the point where they get to have the surgery. It it's really that one year data set that's very difficult, and complex for hospitals to collect, because those patients have hopefully forgotten that they even had a surgery. They're back in their work flow. They're back in their, they've returned to work. They're back in their their usual, flow of life.
But with Force, we make it super easy to actually reach out to those patients. They recognize the platform again as I said synonymous with the care team and they understand that this makes sense that they need to fill out these forms. So we get an incredibly high compliance rate with that one year collection.
And obviously, so that we we really are, you know, committed to helping our clients be compliant with those CMS mandates and, you know, not have to endure any penalties.
I think another important differentiator for Force versus other platforms in the market is that we have more than one hundred and sixty five peer reviewed research publications that show the results that providers and patients get when they use the fourth solution.
Whether that's meeting these CMS problems or requirements or discharging patients directly to home, skipping the SNF or the IRF, and doing that safely and effectively. You know, we can't just withhold care and not replace it with something that's effective and safe. And that's really where our research has supported our value proposition, which is we can deliver a very high quality of care to patients when they're at the home and still get those better, great outcomes, I should say great or better outcomes while reducing the cost of the post acute episode, which is often, you know, forty to fifty percent of the total episode of care.
So that just speaks to the value of an educated patient and the fact that we have clinical validation, published research, you on, you know, patients using our platform really helps us feel like we are doing the right thing for the industry, for our patients, and for health care at large.
The last thing I must last but certainly not least, I wanna say is this our team, is is so pivotal here in this success.
You know, everybody at Force from our engineers to product developers to our our client success and clinical support teams, even our research and marketing teams. Our entire team is really dedicated to our mission of improving and re designing health care in the US in the way that works for everyone.
Most importantly, centrally, the patients that are, undergoing a surgical episode.
And, I mean, you kinda stole the thunder for my next question for you, which was going to be when we talk about who Force is truly built for, who's at the center of that story. I think we all know by now based on this conversation, but would love to spotlight this.
Absolutely. And, yes, we're ultimately we serve the patient.
But I will say that in order to reach the patient, we need to optimize the patient's providers. We would be nothing without our partnership with the nurses, the navigators, the physical therapists, the surgeons, and their support teams, their MAs, their PAs.
And so when we implement Force into a system, whether it's a large academic medical center, an ASC group, or, you know, private practice, we work very closely with the multifaceted multi multifaceted clinical team, to create efficient, scalable workflows.
And, really, we wanna enable that care team to be more efficient and effective with reaching their own patients.
And some of the ways we do this is, you know, by enabling those providers to automate repetitive touch points, to create systems where they can triage and intelligently identify patients that need personalized outreach and clinical oversight.
And so the patient themselves is always getting prescriptive information, instructions that are specific to them at the right time in their care journey.
And so, you know, all of that comes together to really speed those patients to better outcomes, and leveraging that patient provider connection to get them there.
What's something maybe that most people even inside the health care space might not fully realize, about the problem and the challenges that Force helps solve?
You know, I think a lot I think back to my own patients and how much their anxiety around this huge monumental event can actually impede their recovery, and how almost stress relieving it is for patients to have a trusted resource that they can refer to twenty four seven. You know, they don't have to wait on a hold in eight hundred line holding for somebody who may or may not know them. This is their recovery, their care accessible at any time of the day because emergencies don't happen when hospitals are open necessarily.
So I think that that's a big piece of why our patients or the patients that use Force are so successful.
You know, by giving them these tools to recover at home, we can impact and reduce complications, readmissions. We can improve patient satisfaction and functional outcomes.
And so, you know, I think that's potentially not something that's often spoken about, but it's it's it's a very real tangible, you know, issue for a lot of patients.
And then I think that on the care team side, you know, a lot of care teams themselves don't want to use digital care to replace in person care, and they worry that, you know, that will take away from the personalized patient experience. And we couldn't agree more.
Our goal isn't to replace essential in person touch points, but to enhance them.
You know, every patient deserves a personalized care plan, and that's why we've implemented our intelligent care plan, which is a proprietary system that drives our platform to create personalized care for every single patient. We wanna make sure that patients are getting exactly what they need when they need it, and it's care for them.
And so we really do walk that line between making things automated and easy for the care team and, you know, providing that personalized journey for every single patient.
Thanks so much, Bronwyn, for sitting down with me today. It's great to, you know, hear how Force is helping hospitals deliver personalized care at scale and really truly improving the patient's experience.
And to our listeners, thanks for tuning in. For more information, visit forcetherapeutics.com, and please follow us on LinkedIn for more insights on patient engagement strategies and care delivery innovations.
See you next time.
Thanks, Dana. Bye.
