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FORCE Therapeutics Founder and CEO Bronwyn Spira shares her journey from physical therapist to Healthcare Transformer and explores how she’s scaling her virtual treatment platform to reach thousands of patients.
GUEST: Bronwyn Spira, CEO of FORCE Therapeutics
HOST: Steven Krein and Unity Stoakes
LOCATION: StartUp Health Studios (NYC, NY)
Show Notes and Key Takeaways
The ‘Aha’ Moment
[7:55] Bronwyn: “Healthcare is complicated. It’s very hard to solve it from the outside. If you’ve been in it for a long time, and you understand the unique issues, it helps to solve them to some degree.”
[8:50] Bronwyn: “When I think about the “aha” moment, it was when I had stepped away from my first practice that I built. It was just after I had my child, that was five years ago. It took me…I needed to step away from being in the weeds of practicing to actually understand that there was a bigger problem to solve.”
[9:19] Bronwyn: “I started thinking about what it is that patients really need to enable them to do what it was that I wanted them to do as a clinician because I realized that it wasn’t…The piece of paper wasn’t really doing the job
Physical Therapy = Big Costs
[16:24] Bronwyn: “When we looked at those episode payments, we realize that 41 percent of the total episode cost was in the post‑acute care phase. That means not surgery, not anesthesiology, not hospital fees, not medication. Post‑acute care. That’s physical therapy.”
[10:01] Bronwyn: “Then we realized that as healthcare was changing, this could actually solve an even greater problem which is an $850 billion problem. That is how much the US healthcare system spends on musculoskeletal disease every year, and growing.”
Patient Expectations
[24:42] Bronwyn: “One thing that we have found with a lot of patients is that anxiety about recovery is all about not knowing what to expect.”
[25:16] Bronwyn: “We really feel that because healthcare is so personal, because we are dealing with people and not things, we have to bring in this human element.”
[26:36] Bronwyn: “Because activated patients, which are patients that are engaged and active in their care, are more successful patients.”
FORCE Therapeutics in the Future
[29:18] Bronwyn: “My goal will be that FORCE is the standard of care for post‑acute recovery.”
[29: 40] Bronwyn: “That opportunity is actually to collect data on protocols that are successful. If providers need to understand what’s working and what isn’t, we house all of that data.”
[31:34] Bronwyn: “We are so excited about this company that it’s just fun to talk about it. That’s a big piece of it.”
How Can Bronwyn Help You?
[33:36] Bronwyn: “I would tell people to be confident that what they believe to be true is true. It’s so easy in the early days to doubt yourself, to doubt your vision, to doubt your process.You will make mistakes. We made tons of mistakes along the way. At the same time, those mistakes have brought us to this place.”
[34:12] Bronwyn: “It’s all just been following that vision of helping the patients, and reinventing health care. You just have to keep your eye on that the whole time.”
[35:39] Bronwyn: “You just have to be a sponge. Absorb everything. Stuff that you can’t use right now you put away somewhere, but it’s there so you can access it later.”
