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After a relative suffered a heart attack a few years ago, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Adrian Aoun got an unsettling look at a health-care system that he diagnosed as an inefficient and outdated mess. Now he believes he has a remedy. It's called Forward, a health-management service that charges a $149 per month — roughly $1,800 a year — to tend to all of its patients' primary-care needs. And not just with attentive doctoring, either; Forward plans to deploy body scanners, sensors, giant touch-screen monitors, infrared devices and other high-tech gizmos that could make a doctor's appointment feel more like a trip to an Apple store. (Liedtke, 1/17)

Most health-care startups try to fix things by spreading software across the analog parts of the medical industry. For Forward, founder Adrian Aoun is ditching that approach in favor of engineering a doctor's office from scratch. Forward doesn't replace your health insurance. Instead, members pay a steep $149 per month to have unlimited access to Forward's primary care services and its first office—a gleaming lobby in San Francisco's Financial District full of body scanners and infrared vein finders. Forward hopes that by making it easier and more pleasant to see a doctor, patients will do it more often—and catch expensive health issues like cancer and heart disease earlier. (Huet, 1/18)