Caspia Health

As a family of doctors, my parents and I could not keep up with their medical issues. I thought, what are other people doing? My parents resorted to keeping a binder and composition notebook for their health information, like so many of my patients, but they did not have it with them all the times they needed it. I sought to digitize that, including features such as search and share, to help get even more value out of the stored data. 

There is no effective way to keep up with one’s healthcare information. Educated and well-organized patients and families use a 3-ring binder for documents they receive and a composition notebook for symptoms they are tracking. Otherwise, some families also upload documents to Google Drive or email themselves copies. Finally, one family we spoke to used a running Word document. We believe this system needs to change. We believe the lack of a well-designed system of storage of one's health information leads many people not to do it and that, in turn, leads to many people systematically dis-empowered when it comes to their own health issues. We see people not even knowing why they are taking their 10+ medications. They don't know if they have high blood pressure or high cholesterol. They did not realize that the blood thinner medicine had fallen off their list of medications. 

Through more knowledge, they will have more control, and thus more power of their own health issues.  

Patient and caregiver centered app that allows users to take text notes and voice notes, upload images and files, and track symptoms. Users can use the smart search and built-in filters to reference their notes, share their notes with caregivers or providers, and trend symptoms that they have been tracking to get more value out of their information.  

We also created a health summary that collates user data into a short and useful health summary for users to share with their health providers. Finally, we plan to implement features to share data directly through telemedicine platforms. 

Patients with chronic conditions or complex health issues, families who are helping to manage a dependent’s health issues, and physicians who are able to get real-time health information to diagnose more effectively and create better treatment plans. 

We found that the target market for our product is primarily females with families and people with chronic illnesses who need to interact with their health almost daily. 

Similar to pandemics, new substances of abuse actually make waves across various populations and NLP analysis of Twitter / Facebook / Instagram has been proven to be instrumental in proactively dealing with drug ‘outbreaks’ in local communities. Currently there is no similar source of data for symptoms that could be related to an infectious outbreak. Our solution provides such a platform. We plan to use anonymized and abstracted data for population health purposes, including tracking infectious disease outbreaks. Females will likely be the primary users of the app for their whole family.   

Currently, there are no AI-enabled note-taking apps that are focused on patients and caregivers. Specifically, existing similar solutions ask patients to categorize their own notes, do not have search, and auto-correct medical terminologies. People are using Google Drive and WhatsApp as work-arounds because those provide the ability to upload images and files, which are important in the area of healthcare. 

Our solution is innovative not only in its design and capabilities to take multi-media notes and share them with family members, but also because of AI-enabled features that allow users to get the most value from their health information. 

Our solution includes software technology that allows users to 

- create, edit, delete, share, and print multi-media notes

- track and trend information

- use machine learning to enhance search queries and create focused health summaries

- use image processing to identify and tag images for inclusion in search results and health summaries

I built the MVP product as a webapp to use for myself and my family in 2016. We used it for over a year before hackers got into it and it was shut down by the server company for not being secure enough. Until we lost it, my family and I did not realize how valuable what we had was. We missed it enormously. It had worked so well for us that I decided to find a technically inclined co-founder and she is building it currently. 

Vision: We would like all patients and caregivers to be empowered with their medical information to have a better understanding of their health issues and needs, make better lifestyle choices that are more conducive towards a healthier life, and can engage with their providers to participate in a more goal-directed and achievable treatment plan for their acute or chronic issues that may arise. 

Step 1: Patients and families will begin to enter small amounts of health data that they feel they want to remember but do not have a place to put it. 

Step 2: Patients and families will begin to reference that data, seeing the value of their efforts to enter it, and reinforcing that behavior to enter more health data. 

Step 3: Patients and families build communities with of caregiving with the app, using the share notes feature where other people can contribute to health notes, caregiving plans, and /or lists of questions to ask the providers. 

Step 4: Patients and families use the AI enabled features to generate summaries of their health information focused on their cardiac issues or trends of their symptoms related to their chemotherapy treatments and give their time-stamped information to the providers to help them devise an even more optimized treatment plan, which patients benefit from in quality and quantity of life. 

Step 5: Providers, patients, and families all see the value of this app and are using it regularly for their health-related information recording needs. It is now synced to the EHRs, anonymized data is extracted for population health analyses, and communities are being built centered around disease conditions. 

Currently – 0

In one year – 10,000

In five years – 3,000,000

Within the next year, we expect to refine our product, hire a technical team to upgrade our machine learning algorithms, and launch our go-to-market plans. 

Within five years, we will scale within this country and translate the app to at least 5 other languages. We also plan to add features to connect our app to EHRs. 

Financial – currently we are boot-strapped. We have not received any outside funds. 

Team – currently we have just two people on the team

Go-to-market – this is a new framework that we are trying to introduce

Financial - We are applying to multiple grants. We have begun to speak with VC firms that focus on AI in healthcare and fund seed round but we are currently too early stage still.

Team – We have begun to source for talent though personal contacts. We are writing job descriptions and making a priority list. 

Go-to-market – We have brought on mentors who run marketing firms and are planning on a multi-prong approach involving physician influencers, educational information about the benefits of recording health information, and, of course, SEO on a user-facing website to direct traffic to the app. 

Nupur Garg, MD

MIT, Class of 2007, Double majors in Course 7 and 10, Double minors in 15 and 21 – winner of Laya Wiesner award for work as SWE President for two years. 

Yale School of Medicine, Class of 2012 – thesis completed on Under-representation of Females in Academia

Mount Sinai in NYC, Emergency Medicine Resident – winner of Resident Research award for research in Health Information Exchange analyses 

Maitreyee Joshi 

Carnegie Mellon University, B.S. in Computer Science

CS Engineer with Disney Imagineering, Stanford University

PM at Microsoft and PathAI

My medical background, knowledge of the healthcare system, and experience with social enterprises and start-ups help lead the direction, networking, and strategic planning of the company. 

Maitreyee’s technical background, experience as PM at large and small companies, and extremely talented skills as both a programmer, systematic thinker, and leader are allowing us to create and launch a well-researched and thought out MVP as a native iOS app with no external funding. 

None currently, but talking with Yale Hospital. 

We plan to have a B to B side of the business that we sell to pharmaceutical companies or other research institutions that allows them to better gather data from their patients undergoing clinical trials. 

We do not plan to sell ads or data. Rather, we may use the fremium model in addition to the B to B arm of the business. 

Primarily, we would like to be a part of the Solve community. Secondarily, we think our app would be extremely valuable in early detection of contagious and life-threatening infectious diseases, especially since the data will be coming directly from the patients and caregivers rather than being suppressed by tertiary parties. 

Our point of most clarity is our solution / technology. We know what we are building and who we are building it for. We would use our partnerships to identify avenues for growth, including best timeline for various expansion techniques. 

In terms of talent recruitment, we worry most about the culture we create at the company. Sometimes this can be the hardest to assess in a candidate. SWe would want partners who also value talent recruitment a similar way. 

Finally, we have chosen to forego some of the easiest types of business models in healthcare, including ad industry ($3 billion industry in healthcare) and selling sensitive patient data, even if it was de-identified. We are open to many other types of business models, but we will be looking to our partners for connections with other types of payers, such as insurance companies or pharmaceutical companies. 

We would most like to partner with patient advocacy organizations to become an app that they support and promote because of how much it may empower patients and caregivers. 

Other types of potential partners include 

- insurance companies who want to achieve better health for their clients, 

- pharmaceutical companies who want to track better symptom data from their clinical research trial participants, 

- government organizations who want to achieve better health for their populations, and

- hospital organizations as a patient satisfaction tool.  

As an Emergency Physician, I know first-hand what it was like to put my life at risk during the Coronavirus pandemic. Fortunately and unfortunately, I was one of the lucky ones whose PPE actually worked while I intubated positive COVID-19 patients in respiratory distress. I chose to self-isolate from my toddler, husband, and elderly father-in-law for a period of time while working during the pandemic, which was one of the more challenging aspects of the burden that healthcare workers have to endure, which sometimes gets ignored. I didn't have Life Insurance or even Disability insurance at the beginning of the pandemic because of the terrible way our healthcare system is set up in the US. 

One thing that we are seeing now, as fall out from the pandemic, is an acute decompensation in our chronically ill patients. Many had DNR / DNI orders placed by non-family because of the risk of obtaining COVID-19 during resuscitation and some died. In talking with patients and families, they struggled to care for themselves / loved ones without the support of visiting nurses, PT, or even regular doctor visits. 

I saw how useful our app could be for those patients facing this challenge at home, many times completely alone. Also for anyone who is trying to trend their fever or track other viral symptoms to see if they could be experiencing COVID-19, our app would help them remember exactly when they experienced what and see trends over time. 

A collection of notes owned by an individual of their healthcare issues is valuable in and of itself. In America, this is not currently the system, but in India this is the system and people use their data extensively. Even more valuable would be a way to use the factual data / health notes to create more knowledge. 

Our first goal is to make the users' existing data more user friendly using ML. Understanding that medical terminology is like a new language, we plan to incorporate ML algorithms to help users find their existing content using associated terms. We plan to use NLP of medical literature databases to identify closely associated terms to the user's search queries that may be in other notes that the user was trying to find. Then, when we see what the user chose, we can improve on our algorithm. 

Next, we plan to use ML to suggest information that the user may want to add, including symptoms they want to track, times to take medicine, and appointments they want to make. We plan to offer times to suggest that they add an image or a voice note. Finally, we plan to partner with a mental health API that allows detection of anxiety and depression through just inflections in voice through an AI algorithm that matched voices with self-scoring tests that patients used.  

Through our market research, we have found that overwhelmingly, our technology is expected to be used primarily by females. Females serve the caregiver role the most in their families. Through our app, we will empower them to have access to more information, build care-giving communities, and thus have better outcomes for the health of their family members. 

Furthermore, our app is a natural fit for use for females experiencing pregnancy, menopause, and also for breast cancer patients undergoing chemo. In fact, the symptom tracking feature idea came from a paper written about a symptom tracking app and its effectiveness in controlling symptoms of females undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer. 

While not designed exclusively for any population, our app is especially useful for traveling populations. For example, one of our earlier beta users is someone who comes to the US often for business and has significant health needs, which needs attending to in every location. With our app, patient's health information will travel with them. The smart health summaries that our app generates will be able to get a refugee's new doctors up to speed on their health issues immediately. For example, if the user wants to create a general health summary, the app will self-select major items to list including demographic data, but also a problem list, surgery list, including any notable complications, allergies, and medications. Furthermore, we plan to include translation of our app in to almost all languages. 

The UN Sustainable Development Goals are numerous, and the one our app targets the most is related to improvement of Health. We believe that there is a system of dis-empowerment of healthcare among patients in most countries. Patients don't own their health data, they don't have a basic fundamental knowledge of certain health issues, and they don't have access to basic health needs. Using our app for information storage is a first step. Through community building and education modules, we can expand its usefulness, especially to help populations in developing nations but also developed nations whose health system is suffering. 

Our solution is not created for any one type of person, and thus can potentially be used by every single person on the planet that uses smartphones. That said, we do have a well-defined target market because of market research data of primarily female patients with a chronic illness or caregivers females. 

Use of our app immediately transforms a patient to whom healthcare happens to to a patient who is controlling their healthcare issues. It has the potential to greatly enhance the health literacy of the entire global population. Users will immediately find value in their efforts to note health issues. They will be encouraged to do it more and more. Communities to solve health issues will be created, information about complex health system will get shared, and finally, health outcomes will be improved everywhere.