iPPS Pandemic

A global and local real-time health data sharing solution for patients and doctors tailored to better cope with future pandemics

Michael Piccirillo, Team Lead

With a global pool of people's real-time health data in place, the current pandemic could have been detected earlier and managed better - locally as well as globally. The problem to be solved is to find a way to enable and motivate a constant feed of real-time patient-centred health information from across the globe into a central data repository. No such solution exists today, neither nationally nor internationally, despite its obvious benefits for all individuals and society. The underlying causes of the problem are that a) the data needed are not widely and routinely collected and b) there are barriers to the pooling and sharing of such health data [ref.]. Our solution will address both.

Our application directly addresses and serves patients (= everybody) and medical professionals. It helps them to collaboratively identify the right combination of treatments that deliver the best outcomes for a specific patient. This serves the providers’ need to perform better in their job, and the patients’ need to perform better in their recovery as well as to receive the best known treatments. Both patients and medics have been involved in the development of the application (testing, workshops).

The resulting data repository will serve a variety of scientific, medical, economical, societal, and governmental needs. The future organisation in charge of the non-profit utilization of these data will also closely collaborate with any interested parties and stakeholders dealing with pandemics.

• Our solution will generally contribute to better healthcare at lower cost (value-based healthcare).
• A non-profit organisation will be in charge of the health data repository and its non-commercial use and will provide free and at-cost services and access for scientific, governmental, and other not-for-profit purposes.
• Developing countries and other areas with limited access to healthcare can use our solution to build a tele-medical infrastructure.
• Everybody will benefit from the pandemic uses of our solution.

On a personal level, our solution will help doctors become more productive, achieve better results, and track the recovery of their patients in real-time. Patients will be empowered and can together with their doctors identify the best and relevant treatment for a specific condition and compare the outcomes of their treatments against validated ‘best practices’.

On the level of healthcare systems, our solution will contribute to better healthcare quality at lower cost: It will help reduce wasted treatments, accelerate the adoption of novel and better treatment methods, shorten the duration of clinical trials (recruitment), and generally accelerate medical and scientific progress (big-data analyses, comparative studies). 

On the level of outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics, our solution will be able to remedy many of the health data related shortcomings revealed during the current crisis (see also ref.): Outbreaks can be detected sooner (early alert system); the spread of disease and effects of measures can be monitored closer (surveillance system); disease characteristics can be recognized earlier (e.g. correlations with demographics or medications); clinical and scientific studies are facilitated (e.g. long-term impacts). Our solution will also be useful for tele-medical services during health emergencies as well as in underserved areas and countries.

Our aspirations are global. Scaling the impact of our solution means growing the number of users of the application and extending their geographic spread. At some point, the resulting database will become relevant enough to also play a role in coping with pandemics and over time grow more and more impactful. Expansion will take place language by language – with an initial focus on Switzerland - and go in sync with the needed and fundable support capacities. We expect first regular users (patients) only towards the end of year one. By year three, however, we anticipate to be in the midst of rapid growth, and impact becoming increasingly visible and tangible. By then, as per our budget and timeline described further on, we aim at 20,000 physicians and 5 million patients using our solution. We will address these physicians and patients using physician societies and patient organisations.

Our basic measure is the number of users. This will be easy to track since our solution requires registration. A secondary measure will be the degree of usage: We expect physicians using iPPS in their daily work, and patients entering data at least once a week. The third measure will be the geographic spread of users.

The crucial short-term barrier is financing the completion of our application. We are now looking for grants or loans. As soon as we have first regular users, we will seek to raise additional equity, presumably by the end of year one.

The major challenge and barrier over three years will be the early set-up of an infrastructure with the resources and expertise to support the fast-track global dissemination of our solution and to exploit and foster the use of the resulting database – in particular related to pandemics. In order to have this in place once the product is ready, we will in a way need to put the cart before the horse (similar to ramping up Covid-19 vaccine production before approval). This is beyond our means and capabilities. We will therefore seek – as a parallel project - to establish a non-profit organisation with the help of yet to find partners. Without this, we could only pursue a path of organic growth.

incredX AG (Switzerland); ASD Aspire Software Development GmbH (Switzerland); Valugen GmbH (Switzerland)

We see The Trinity Challenge as a huge opportunity to realise our vision - tailored to our needs and coming at the right time: We hope that our participation will help us short-term to overcome the financial barrier either directly through an award or indirectly by attracting the attention of potential sponsors and investors. For overcoming the later-stage barrier of an early and accelerated build-up of resources and expertise within a non-profit organisation we will largely depend on outside support e.g. by way of consultancy, assistance in talent recruitment, provision of cloud services, provision of preliminary infrastructure, participation in product trials, providing medical and scientific guidance, or helping us raise endowment capital. Members of The Trinity Challenge would be highly welcome and predestined to become our partners.

We are looking for partners that help establish a foundation in Switzerland, e.g. Swiss RE. Ideally, they would also advance the initial endowment capital. Other Members of The Trinity Challenge would be very welcome to then help develop its operations.