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Forward Health Dashboard
Designing the health dashboard for Forward's final product bet: a full-body diagnostic that arrived too early, and proved it was right.
The search for PMF
By 2024, Forward was searching for product-market fit. The company had built something genuinely ambitious — self-operating clinics, integrated health hardware, a mobile care platform — but hadn't yet found the product that tied it together. The Full Body Diagnostic was that bet.
Members would walk into a CarePod, run a comprehensive screening — blood draw, blood pressure, body composition — and receive a complete picture of their health in the Forward app within two weeks. It was preventive care, productized.
How do we bridge data and action?
A diagnostic is only as useful as what comes after it. Raw lab results — hormones, electrolytes, metabolic markers — mean very little to most people without context. The dashboard needed to close that gap: translate clinical data into something a person could actually act on.
The loop: scan, understand, act
The first instinct was to separate data, insights, and next steps into distinct sections — logical on paper, broken in practice. Users had to scroll through disconnected pieces before anything connected. It increased cognitive load without adding clarity.
The insight that unlocked it: the mapping is the product. Rather than presenting information and leaving users to draw conclusions, we built focus cards — clinician-authored groupings that paired biomarkers with a diagnosis and a clear next step, all in one place. Users didn't need to navigate to understanding; it was surfaced directly.
From there, the dashboard routed users to Forward's Health Apps — personalized plans for cholesterol, hormones, metabolic health — or, where an app didn't yet exist, doctor-written lifestyle guidance. The experience completed a full loop: scan, understand, act.
What happened next?
Forward shut down later that year.
Not because the product was wrong — but because the timing was. Building self-operating clinics with integrated diagnostics and a personalized health platform required capital and infrastructure that the market wasn't ready to sustain at Forward's scale. The product worked. The business didn't survive long enough to prove it.
What's striking is what came after. Ezra, Superpower, and a growing class of full-body diagnostic companies have since emerged with nearly identical product theses. The demand Forward was betting on turned out to be real — it just took the rest of the market a few more years to catch up.
I'm genuinely bullish on where healthcare is going. The existing model — reactive, episodic, opaque — is failing people in ways that are both preventable and measurable. What excites me about the work I did at Forward isn't just the product craft; it's that it pointed at a different possibility: a world where your health is something you engage with continuously, not something you hand off to a system and hope for the best.
Forward didn't make it. But the question it was asking is still worth asking — and the companies now answering it are proof that it was always the right one.