Vibesdoc

Vibesdoc is a patient symptom checker and case information gatherer survey with an AI backend to identify diseases and correlated results to diagnosis with quantifiable confidence. This survey would help patients clear out doubts while providing them with actionable steps to follow as further testing for verification and practitioner recommendations. 

Roberto Baldizon, our solutions leader, has a robust academic background and diverse experience in business and building technology solutions in healthcare.  

In the past decades, Latin America has experienced a surge in infectious diseases such as Dengue, Cholera, Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis, Leptospirosis, Swine Flu, and most recently, Covid-19. 

Although countries from the region share cultural ties, each has very different healthcare systems and diverse life standard conditions that differentiate them. In 2020, at the start of the pandemic, Costa Rica, Panama, and Chile, carried out the most testing and thus appeared to have more cases than their neighbours. These countries have been much more effective than the rest in handling the pandemic. Nations that conducted fewer tests seemed to have fewer cases at first but still struggle to get a hold of such disease. 

Nine out of 20 countries conducting the lowest disease screening per capita are in Latin America. It's worrying that these countries have a sharp rise in infectious diseases and chronic conditions concurrently from more developed populations living at their urban centres. Thus a cultural and institutional approach to patient testing and monitoring is paramount. Currently, getting a medical test in this region is troublesome. As there are not enough places to acquire it, they are prone to high costs and inaccuracies in diagnosis.

To better understand our offering's market perception, we carried out a survey answered by more than 250 people anonymously. According to survey results and feedback gathered, the target market that would pay for such a solution and the most interested in pursuing it would be 20 to 40-year-olds, primarily female, college-educated, higher income, and interested in health. 
From this research, we perceived that physicians and patients do not trust the power of an AI enough to rely on it solely for diagnosis. Nevertheless, when feeling sick, they would pay a premium price for a service that guides them on steps to take to get the needed help. 
Patients would use Vibesdoc to understand better their symptoms and what they mean and find the right professional to help them. Physicians would also use the service as an additional tool to get more information from the patient before their visit.
Currently, people go to hospitals, labs or clinics to get guidance and testing for potential diseases. Patients have to rely on self-research on symptoms, practitioners, and tests before getting the needed aid to get treatment. 

Although we have already published a white paper elaborating about the algorithm that powers Vibesdoc, we believe the most benefit will be making the tool accessible by the public for free. With Vibesdoc, people will better understand their symptoms and get guidance to take steps to alleviate them for free to reduce the initial barrier to usage that cost might represent for them. For institutions and practitioners, this tool will optimise processes and flows, thus reducing wasted unnecessary costs while increasing the demand of patients they specialise in treating. 

Remote rapid testing using point of care and over the counter assays is a growing trend in the industry. 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/b...

Nevertheless, like many other healthcare solutions in the market, these tests and different lab results remain of little use for many due to lack of integrability with existing EHR/EMR systems. This feature will be critical in the development of Vibesdoc. 
https://www.nature.com/article...

Vibesdoc would leverage existing tools by enhancing them with an interactive app that would engage patients in treatment, thus making it more participative. 
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

Numerous EHR/EMR companies have tried to do so but have not been compelling enough, leading to creating the patient engagement trend from which solutions such as PatientPop or ZocDoc have emerged. 

Therefore by targetting users by symptom and diseases, instead of merely geographic location or web searches, we believe we would increase the conversion rate and optimise flows for people, institutions, companies, and patients alike. 
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

Vibesdoc is designed for scale with a robust architecture utilising Facebook's react framework for the frontend and Google's Golang for the API connectivity with a Cloud NoSQL database. The architecture is built for future democratisation as the API would handle requests from other frontend surveys besides the one we have developed and the rest we will create. Currently, we have started talks with Novartis and Costa Rica's ministry of health to explore a potential partner through which we could reach millions of users quickly. If successful, the same type of partnership would be sought in the rest of Central America and the Caribbean and perhaps globally. Through Vibesdoc, we envision users constantly screened and tested for conditions whenever they feel unwell and want to seek help. This tool will be a great add on for practitioners, clinics, insurance companies, medical labs, and the entire supply chain alike. Vibesdoc optimises the whole patient flow for efficiency with the help of passed medical cases. 

At the beginning of this project, we intended it to be a wholly private and nonprofit venture to avoid potential hurdles involving HIPAA and GDPR. Therefore, with our covid app, we are not collecting any identifiable data nor tracking users in any way. For this new iteration of the tool as Vibesdoc, we would enhance the tracking and monitoring capabilities for long term sustainability. Currently, the only metrics to measure usage and performance are those provided by AWS, displaying a constant but still low use of the application, averaging 3 per cent of its full capabilities for our 8 GB EC2 instances. 

The main barriers to implement a solution of this nature is getting the right partnerships to provide data, and allow for their processes to be enhanced. We believe that in three years the problem would be the same but augmented. 

Silibrain LLC

Working within the Trinity Challenge and with organisations such as MIT's Solve would aid in providing greater credibility to land our initial main project involving big pharma companies, or health ministries or healthcare software companies to start generating revenues and getting some traction. Through these networks, we would also be able to reach more people in less time with a better-built solution.

Many of our advisors come from Academia, but we are lacking partnerships with health ministries and other potential partners to pilot solutions to get to market more efficiently with synergistic support.