Ora: Empowering Precision Public Health

Rapidly spreading infectious disease threatens global well-being on an unprecedented scale - with significant clinical, social and humanitarian costs. 

Ora help improve the lives of millions of vulnerable people around the world. We believe that AI-empowered healthcare, won’t just save lives, but through our platform, democratise well-being and self care, like never before. We leverage technology & human-centered innovation to predict outbreaks ahead of the curve.

Our Consumer solution allows for democratisation of vital healthcare info and personalised insights to help individuals and families stay safe, as well as a chatbot & telehealth service to allow them access to affordable healthcare.

Our Enterprise solution allows organisations to gain insights on disease trends, health risks, and recommended actions for mitigation; empowering precision, population health for those most in need.

Our mission is to reduce disease burden in the form of incidence, morbidity, mental health problems, reduced healthcare spend and increase productivity.

Rapidly spreading infectious disease threatens global well-being on an unprecedented scale - with significant clinical, social and humanitarian costs.

A hypermobile, digitally connected population need proactive solutions, to address the spread of illness, misinformation and fear, especially for the most at risk: marginalized, vulnerable, displaced and low-income populations.

From an organisational perspective, healthcare providers such as Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) are facing unprecedented challenges in the movement of people, both within and across borders. The spread of preventable infectious diseases in vulnerable groups is at times an impossible problem, and those without affordable means of accessing quality healthcare services, suffer most with disease burden, loss of income and mental health sequelae felt through generations.

COVID-19 has sadly devastated individuals, communities and impacted the world at an unprecedented scale. But this is just one of many infectious diseases killing millions annually.

In the face of uncertainty and fear - an overwhelming tide of information has left people feeling powerless, isolated and vulnerable. In the developing world, where access to healthcare is at a premium - we learnt from customer interviews with organisations such as MSF - that the spread of infectious diseases is all the more devastating, and unpredictable.

We believe that AI-empowered healthcare, won’t just save lives, but through our platform, democratise well-being and self care and empowering consumers and healthcare professionals through data-driven insights

The Ora platform was developed alongside and validated with clinicians and organisations in a collaborative effort as an AI empowered tool for tackling humanitarian healthcare crises. Ora incorporates AI & data-driven insights with real-time statistics, regional infectious disease prevalence, providing an early warning system for communicable diseases in vulnerable populations, leveraging technology & human-centered innovation to predict outbreaks ahead of the curve.

Our Consumer solution allows for democratisation of vital healthcare information and personalised insights to help individuals and families stay safe, as well as a chatbot & telehealth service to allow them access to affordable healthcare.

Our Enterprise solution allows organisations to gain insights on disease trends, health risks, and recommended actions for mitigation; empowering precision, population health for people in need.

Our unique value proposition is the combination of data analytics for disease tracking and prediction, incorporating a wide range of sources, coupled with social media sentiment analysis to derive early insights, allowing us to preempt potential risks, and provide valuable, actionable insights for individuals and organisations to act early.

Outbreaks of infectious diseases are critical challenges facing the world’s most vulnerable populations.

People living in poverty, fragile contexts and countries affected by conflict, poor governance, and natural disasters are most at risk. Access to timely & affordable healthcare is lacking.

The frequency and variety of infectious disease outbreaks have increased significantly over the past 30 years. Since 2011, the world has seen nearly 200 epidemic events per year (WEF, 2019) causing significant disease burden, loss of productivity and quality of life.

“For vulnerable families, loss due to an outbreak can translate to spikes in poverty, missed meals for children, and reduced access to healthcare far beyond the disease.” (Center for Global Development, 2020)

B2C: Our Consumer solution allows for democratisation of vital healthcare info and personalised insights to help individuals and families stay safe, as well as a chatbot & telehealth service to allow them access to affordable healthcare, enabling them to survive & thrive.

B2B (org/biz/gov): Our Enterprise solution allows organisations to gain timely insights on disease trends, health risks, and recommended actions for mitigation; enabling them to coordinate response to rapidly spreading disease threats, and empowering precision, population health for those most in need.

Ora is an Data & AI driven real-time health analytics platform to empower the most vulnerable populations and improve the lives of millions of vulnerable, displaced and marginalised communities around the world.

Ora  provide insights on disease trends, health risks, and recommended actions for mitigation; empowering precision, population health for those most in need.

We aim to create a more informed, empathetic and inclusive world - improving collaboration across borders and disciplines.

A new solution to new challenges: Ora combines traditional data analytics for disease prediction with AI-powered sentiment analysis of digital content from the internet (including social media posts, news articles and other sources). We’ve proven this solution for the early prediction of infectious disease and it has the potential to save lives.

Given the speed of human and disease movement, keeping up with fast evolving public health threats is a problem on a global scale. Having a head start will empower users and public health bodies to solve emerging problems, like never before.

Few are bold enough to share: we have identified venture capital funded organisations that are operating in health analytics restricting access to this service to large organisations, willing to pay undisclosed fees. We are bold enough to give our service to users (B2C and B2B) - through a cross-subsidised model geared towards social impact.

Why are we well positioned to solve this problem?

After winning the Microsoft ‘AI for Good’ award with this solution, we validated it in a peer-reviewed journal and shared it through an international keynote at the ‘Data4Good’ conference and in the ‘Leaders in Healthcare’ conference.

The overwhelming support has been incredible, but we are also fueled by our person alignment - Nicole with a background as an entrepreneur, data scientist and community builder, and Reza a doctor working across borders, looking to collaborating with WHO & MSF in data-driven healthcare. We are impassioned to solve it alongside the global community of MIT Solvers.

Technical Overview

• Real Time Social Media Sentiment Implementation

  • Twitter has privately accessible API’s that will that contain geo-tagged tweet data

  • An Azure hosted service would call this API every daily, grouping message into distinct geographic locations

  • Our implementation applies Azure Text Analysis Service phrase extraction to remove the textual noise from the tweets

  • The processed tweets can be fed as input to an Azure Machine Learning model trained on data generated by twitter usage trends of previous disease outbreaks (medical data)

  • Each tweet is given a flu score based on the occurrences of weighted machine algorithm determined text markers.

  • The daily flu score per regions can be determined by dividing the accumulative flu score of the region by the number of tweets

  • Similar models could be adopted to get early warning about mass migrations of refugee populations
    

• Analytics Implementation 

  • Our prototype shows a small-scale implementation of the technology focused on identifying signs of a Hepatitis A outbreak.

  • We have trained a ML model using sample data collected.
    

  • Our training data include a manually tagged corpus of tweets linked with Hepatitis A markers and a collection of random tweets

  • Our machine model can look at a tweet and assign it a classification weighting / flu score based on the appearance of textual markers. 

  • This process applied to the enormous amounts of social data being generated daily could help healthcare organization develop better strategies for outbreak containment.

We have a broad, academic evidence base, to support the need and effectiveness of predictive capability, when it comes to the transmission of communicable diseases, human movement and the use of real time data such as social media sentiment analysis.

Our research on Ora was peer reviewed and presented at international conference (Leaders in Healthcare & Data4Good), won the Microsoft AI for Good Hackathon, Acumen Rockefeller Foundation Student Innovation Accelerator (announcement due end of June) and is being considered as a case study for Tech Futures Lab.

We have conducted an initial literature review of academic journals and articles and identified research that support the financial viability and potential benefits associated with our solution. By reducing the burden on the healthcare system, we can significantly reduce the associated negative flow-on effects, hidden costs & societal externalities, starting with preventative treatment through vaccines.

Our theory of change focuses on delivering simple, easy to understand information about infectious disease risks, preemptively and proactively, empowering timely decision making, and improves a range of metrics that quantify precision population health.

With Ora our mission is to reduce disease burden in the form of incidence, morbidity, mental health problems, reduced healthcare spend and increase productivity.

• We achieve this by offering healthcare providers access to the Ora platform for real-time health data analytics and provide insights on public health interventions.
• Creating a precision public health platform that informs decisions coordinates efforts and empowers both the public and organisations.
• Leading to improved health metrics, including the control of disease spread, resource optimisation and other public health outcomes.
• Reduced disease burden, fewer sick days, reduced health spend, improved productivity, stronger economy. 

For organisations looking to build upon the UN SDG 3 for Health and Wellbeing - we will empower them to achieve their targets and beyond, and find that sweet spot where business impact creates social impact.

We are currently in the development phase. Once the pilot is trialed and the solution is launched, We are aiming to serve 5000 customers in New Zealand, in the first year, as our beachhead market. Expanding to 250,000 across Australia and New Zealand within 2 years. Serve 1.5 million users across Asia Pacific by year 3, and expanding to 15 million users across the globe by end of year 5.

Please refer to the top half of the diagram for our potential risks and barriers

Please refer to the bottom half of the diagram for our risk mitigation plans 

Not applicable

We have 2 dedicated co-founders, with diverse range of skill sets and extensive domain knowledge, practical experience in healthcare, data science, technology, design, and business. We have established an advisory group made up of esteemed subject matter experts. We will be looking to grow our team in the future.

Our team is made up of experienced professionals with multi-disciplinary experience across healthcare, technology, business and design.

• • Dr Reza Jarral - Reza has worked with vulnerable populations as a primary care physician, in London and Auckland, as well as under-resourced populations in low-income countries using telemedicine. He is a recipient of the Princess Diana Memorial Award & a Master Candidate at Tech Futures Lab, and an Edmund Hillary Entrepreneurial Fellow. Reza's interests in digital innovation include AI, telemedicine and the ethical/societal impacts of algorithmic technologies, exploring the best in digital innovation and responsible design to democratise well-being. Reza also sit on working groups allied with the Partnership on AI (IEEE, The AI Council & AI Forum NZ) that work to shape a better and brighter collective future, using technology. https://www.linkedin.com/in/rezajarral/

  • Nicole Yue Lin - Nicole has extensive multidisciplinary experience from working across business, consulting, and technology sectors, including currently as a data scientist in New Zealand’s largest digital services company. She is leading a working group at the NZ AI Forum, a member of Philanthropy New Zealand's Youth Advisory Group, and has received numerous accolades, including Google Women Techmakers Scholar & New Zealand Local Hero Medal Winner. She previously worked at Microsoft and PwC, and is a mentor for numerous entrepreneurship programmes inAuckland. https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicoleyuelin/

We are joined by a panel of esteemed mentors and advisors from with specialist domain and expert knowledge, hailing from renowned organisations like Harvard Medical School, Blizard Institute, across Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, and Healthcare.

On our completion of the Acumen Rockefeller Student Innovation Accelerator, we were inducted into the Acumen Community of Social Innovators, an exclusive global network of social entrepreneurs. We work with community members and Fellows to cultivate networks for collaboration around the globe.

Reza is a Fellow of the Edmund Hillary Fellowship, a global community of high impact investors and entrepreneurs, collaboratively building new paradigm solutions to global challenges. Utilising this organisation to leverage expertise, funding and distribution will be key to making Ora a reality. 

Furthermore, Reza is a member of the Tech Futures Lab community, a Graduate School for Human Impact based in New Zealand, where we can draw upon expertise and knowledge from alumni and subject matter experts.

We have also connected with contacts in critical organisations such as Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF), to discuss potential partnerships in the future.

We will operate a cross-subsidised business model, with proceeds from our B2B solution used to fund access for the consumer app & B2B SAAS, to democratise access to healthcare for those at the bottom of the pyramid.

For Consumers, we will operate a freemium B2C model, offering the app for free for basic functions, and charging an affordable $5/month to unlock additional features, and $15 per telemedicine consultation.

For Organisations, we will operate a tiered B2B model, offering the enterprise SAAS for $500/month for orgs in the OECD & $100/month for orgs in developing nations, plus additional services.

We will reduce the startup costs through bootstrapping, grants, and pro-bono services from our partnerships.

Based on our existing projections, we expect to break even and achieve default alive position by year 2.

We are deeply passionate about harnessing technology to create social impact, especially in tackling the challenges as set out by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals outlining critical and urgent issues faced by humankind. Having personally witnessed and experienced the 

We appreciate the opportunity to be able to work alongside MIT in building and scaling our solution. We deeply resonate with the values of MIT and the Solve program.

MIT Media Lab

MIT Sloan School of Management

MIT Solve Healthcare Community 

MIT Professor of Innovation Eric von Hippel - Reza was taught by Professor von Hippel at the MIT - Harvard Healthcare Innovaton Program, June 2019. Professor von Hippel’s work on user innovation and entrepreneurship inspired Reza to form Ora with Nicole. It would be a privilege to involve Faculty from the MIT Sloan School of Management in this venture.

Microsoft Philanthropies and AI for Good - scaling our tech solution

Supporting the rollout of our solution across emerging economies to serve the most vulnerable populations:

Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

Bloomberg Philanthropies

WHO, UN, UNDP