WoW Woman in Health Tech I Bronwyn Spira, founder and CEO of Force Therapeutics

Bronwyn Spira is a physical therapist and the founder and CEO of Force Therapeutics, a digital care management platform that gives orthopedic patients access to customized education and virtual physical therapy throughout an episode of care. Prior to founding Force, Bronwyn ran the Inpatient Rehab department at Rusk Rehabilitation Center at NYU Langone Health before founding and managing a successful New York-based multi-clinic orthopedic rehabilitation practice. She earned her Bachelor of Science degree and Master of Science degree in Physiotherapy from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and is based in New York City. 

Force Therapeutics was founded in 2010 to facilitate faster, more effective postoperative recovery through remote patient monitoring, customized care plans, and virtual education and physical therapy. Named MedTech Breakthrough’s Best Overall Patient Engagement Solution in 2020, the Force Therapeutics platform serves as an extension of the patient’s care team, enabling real-time interventions while helping to reduce readmissions and lower the cost of care. Force partners with more than 400 clinical care teams at hospitals, health systems, academic medical centers, and ambulatory surgical centers to support orthopedics, bariatrics, cardiac care, obstetrics, and non-operative musculoskeletal care. Force provides operational workflows and infrastructure for provider care teams to manage their patients remotely and drive outcomes-based quality care delivery to all their patients, regardless of access to the clinic or hospital. 

Tell us a bit about your background and your projects so far.

I chose to study physical medicine because I’d always been drawn to impacting people's ability to live their lives without pain or physical limitation. Growing up as a dancer, I understood deeply how any type of MSK injury can permeate every aspect of someone’s daily life, their careers, sports, hobbies, and even self-care. 

During my 20+ year clinical career as a physical therapist, I treated thousands of patients in multiple settings, from the hospital to the home, and subsequently managed many providers in my various roles. Over time, I began to grow frustrated by how my patients were struggling with the same issues, from inadequate access to understanding their treatment plans. I felt we could do a better job of coordinating care to support patients through their recovery journeys. As smart phone technology became more ubiquitous, I also started to get excited about the potential opportunity in front of us: If we could leverage digital recovery data for true care redesign, we could improve care quality and patient outcomes globally. 

When we started Force Therapeutics, EHRs were in their infancy, and there certainly weren’t any patient-facing digital tools on the market that provided patients with the provider-driven education and instruction necessary for a virtual recovery experience. I enlisted the help of a Solutions Architect and a team of developers to create a basic beta product that would provide a closed-loop of communication and information system between patients and their providers, and started using it with my own patients. 

Even though the product was rudimentary and a far cry from the comprehensive platform we have today, I was overwhelmed with the response from my patients, who were suddenly able to access their recovery plans 24/7, communicate with me and their other providers in my clinic and track their progress toward their goals. At the same time, I felt like my own eyes had been opened to my patients' functional outcomes and challenges in the home. From there we felt compelled to build on the initial promise of what patients and providers really needed: an end-to-end digital platform that empowered patients to recover while enabling coordinated workflows to help clinicians manage their patients in a scalable, data-driven paradigm. 

How did you get into this industry? Has it been an easy industry to get into or have you had many challenges?

When we started Force Therapeutics, there wasn’t an established digital health category, so we were essentially creating a market from scratch. It was a new concept for many health providers and initially was met with resistance from everyone other than the very innovative first movers in the space. Ultimately, the value-based care movement was creating incentives to change the way healthcare was delivered and, once those financial incentives were established (alternative payment models like bundled care), things started to really escalate for us. 

On a more personal note, moving from a clinical role into the world of health tech entrepreneurship was not easy at first. While my background as a clinician—and my conviction that the Force platform was both viable and genuinely beneficial for both patients and their physicians—gave me the strength of purpose, I had only run brick-and-mortar businesses, and running a tech company presented a pretty steep learning curve. 

I missed hearing from patients so much that we created an internal Slack channel with patient feedback on how they were feeling about their recovery journeys in Force and what their goals were, which helped ‘scratch that itch’ initially. We still have that channel, and it continues to feed the clinician in me any time I need my ‘fix’.

How long did it take you to be where you are now? What was the biggest obstacle? What are the challenges of being in the industry you are in? 

We launched Force in 2010, starting with one systems architect based on the West Coast of the U.S. and a lean team of engineers in India. The biggest challenge for me was the communication and timing of our calls since I basically had to coordinate across multiple time zones on any given day. Some of the challenges included implementing complex security systems for the platform and flexible yet structured data that would inform care redesign and product development. 

Another obstacle in the early days was overcoming the negative stigma that early EHRs had engendered with providers. While today, EHRs are central to any health system’s business, when we started Force, they were still in their infancy and disrupting provider workflows dramatically. 

What are your biggest achievements to date?

To date, more than 600,000 patients have recovered successfully using the Force platform. We have over 500 providers using our technology to design and deliver care plans to patients far beyond the hospital walls. I am so proud that our platform has evolved to serve all patients regardless of Social Determinants of Health (SDOH), including physical access challenges, language barriers, and even educational disparities. This was always my dream; my belief that every person deserves access to evidence-based care is stronger now than ever before. 

 I’m also very proud that the majority of our clients have continued to grow with us year after year. Many of our health system partners continue to expand their use of the platform from total joint replacements to sports medicine, trauma care, and beyond. I feel good knowing that we're delivering true value to our customers and their patients. 

The clinically validated patient data we collect has been used to facilitate the discovery of new evidence-based practices for the orthopedic industry at large. Our data have been cited in more than 110 published clinical research studies to inform care redesign. The ability to share these findings means we can help shape the future of the way care is delivered and received. 

We are also very focused on supporting providers as they navigate the current workforce crisis, which is creating a vicious cycle of chronic burnout for many health workers. A big focus for us is ensuring that our platform is making clinicians’ lives easier by streamlining their workflows and allowing them to do more with less. Providers have to figure out how to provide personalized care to so many patients without having the luxury of hiring more staff. Our platform helps them manage by exception to effectively monitor all patients while identifying which patients need extra attention and support. 

What are the projects you are currently working on?

We’ve just released an add-on offering that helps our clients leverage the new CPT codes for remote therapeutic monitoring (RTM), which will allow them to document and bill for the work they’re doing with remote patient communication, data collection, and tracking patient progress via the platform. Providers' time spent remotely monitoring and communicating with patients is finally being recognized by payers as valuable treatment interactions. It’s a pivotal moment in the digital health transformation, and I’m so glad that Force can be a part of expanding our collective idea of what care should look like. 

We’re always striving to improve health equity in orthopedics by enhancing the accessibility of our digital health tools. Offering clinically validated remote education and therapy to patients in their homes can have an enormous impact on improving access to care, but the tools have to be usable by all populations—including the 43% of lower-income adults without broadband services at home, or all those who are smartphone-only internet users, or those who speak English as a second language. We are making sure that all patients can watch our videos without streaming them, and we are universally available and multi-modal, offering two-way text messaging, native apps, and web-based communication. Wherever we can, we’re working to remove barriers to care. Our entire platform is now available in Spanish, which is having a tremendous impact on some of our safety net hospitals that serve a large Hispanic population. 

Is the #WomenInTech movement important to you and if yes, why? 

Of course, because representation is so important. To develop universal technology solutions, we believe the team building the solutions should mirror the population as a whole. We want to have a broad perspective to strengthen the final product. We strive for diversity of thought and experience; gender, age, ethnicity, and national diversity on our team will allow us to deliver a product that all people can consume. 

Personally and professionally, I am dedicated to supporting women in their careers, ensuring that they have effective mentorship and opportunities for career growth, promotions, continuing education, and visibility within the organization. 

What will be the key trends in your industry in the next five years and where do you see them heading?

The pandemic really shone a light on the health and healthcare disparities that have been around for decades, and we need to continue to address health equity as a priority. I believe we are only as healthy as the most underserved members of our nation, and we need to do a better job of identifying the barriers they face and coming up with solutions to overcome them. CMS published a Framework for Health Equity to guide the next decade of policymaking, and I see a lot of momentum toward standardizing care across all patient populations. In the next five years, I believe we’ll continue to see initiatives to ensure a gold standard of care for all patients, regardless of their socioeconomic status, SDOH, or minority membership. Health equity is finally becoming a top priority for all the players in healthcare. 

The second big trend that I see revolves around the need to leverage data for clinical insights both at the individual level, at the point of care, and at the population level for true care redesign. Clinicians and physicians now have access to an explosion of data, but it’s often presented to them without context or direction. We need systems that organize and contextualize what these datasets mean, systems that use a clinical lens to interpret these data sets in a useful manner. I think clinical insights will be the next evolution of big data. 

What is the most important piece of advice you could give to anyone who wants to start a career in this industry?

There’s a quote from Stephen Hawking that l like, which is: “If you feel you are in a black hole, don’t give up. There’s a way out.” Making headway in the healthcare space is notoriously resistant to change and slow to innovate, but I believe that the sentiment expressed here rings true: There’s always hope even when you feel like there isn’t. Keep on keeping on! 

Who are three inspirational women in your respective industry you admire?

Two of my three choices are not in healthcare specifically, but all of them are having a significant impact on health outcomes. 

Stacy Abrams, the former minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives who is currently running for governor of Georgia is so impressive! Not only is she working for voter reform, but she has a big initiative around quality healthcare and better health outcomes. She has a healthcare platform that is extremely robust around servicing the Medicaid population and protecting the Affordable Care Act. She is a strong, vocal advocate for protecting women’s health, which is especially relevant at this moment with women’s abortion rights under threat. She’s also very outspoken about increasing support for the elderly, those with disabilities, and Alzheimer’s patients. 

Secondly, Jacinda Ardern, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, is a true role model of mine. Her population-based approach to the pandemic was inspiring. She led with empathy to enact tough restrictions that served her country well, and she did it all by engendering her constituents’ trust. She took fast, decisive actions and explained the rationale behind them so well; as a result, New Zealand’s population suffered much less from Covid19 early on than other countries. 

Last but not least, I deeply admire Karen Lynch, the president and CEO of CVS Health. She has led its vaccine distribution rollout and done so much for health equity and access. More than 30% of the vaccines administered to date are to those in underserved communities. CVS Health has also invested millions in affordable housing because she believes strongly, that in order to improve health, you first need to make sure people have adequate housing. Its new Health Zones program, an integrated approach to improving health equity in underserved communities, addresses everything from transportation needs to nutrition, education, and employment. I’m excited to see how this model works in the pilot areas. 

Find out more about Force Therapeutics on their website.

Follow Force Therapeutics on LinkedIn and Twitter.

This interview was conducted by Marija Butkovic, Digital Marketing and PR strategist, founder, and CEO of Women of Wearables. She regularly writes and speaks on topics of wearable tech, fashion tech, IoT, entrepreneurship, and diversity. Follow Marija on Twitter @MarijaButkovic and read her stories for Forbes here.