Proactive Intervention Advisor: Keeping Travelers Healthy

Keeping individuals safe during travels through real-time, personalized, and proactive recommendations on disease risk prevention, at a global scale.

Dr. Kamran Khan, MD, MPH.

Over 4 billion passengers board flights every year, creating enormous global exposure to infectious disease from anywhere in the world. As seen with COVID-19 and other diseases, the international spread of disease is most often caused by the traveling public. Proactive preventions among travelers are among the most cost-effective, and most poorly designed interventions available. 

Critically, the impact of infectious disease is not evenly distributed, even if the world's more vulnerable populations travel less often. During the COVID-19 pandemic, "inequality rose in virtually every country on earth at the same time (source: Oxfam)." Ensuring travelers do not spread disease improves both the wellbeing of these travelers and the more vulnerable communities exposed to travelers.

Travelers are not effectively empowered to take precautionary measures against contracting and spreading infectious diseases. Existing information is inaccessible, disorganized, and usually irrelevant. Misinformation is rampant and spreading. There are no interventions based on the established best practices of Behaviour Design (source: Stanford.edu).

Our solution offers individuals the ability to effectively protect themselves from infectious diseases. Consequently, it offers the world an ability to proactively curb the spread and consequence of these diseases. And, we propose to do this on a genuinely global scale.

Our solution will serve all individuals who engage in travel. Travelers are an epidemiologically important population because of their mobility, their potential for exposure to diseases outside their local area, and the possibility that they may serve as a conduit for disease from one country to another. With 4.5 billion passenger trips per year (2019), travelers are large drivers for disease spread. As globalization allows for increasing interactions between different regions and populations around the globe, the spread of infectious diseases will only become more common, and thus the need for preventive interventions more severe.

Through user interviews with this target audience, we selected the format of a hyper-intelligent to-do list. The user interviews also highlighted 3 key problems to infectious disease risk prevention for the traveler. First, information on infectious disease risks is too disorganized to be useful. Second, practical information on health and safety precautions is non-existent. And third, it is hard to compare and assess the risks for their relative severity. Our proactive, personalized, and actionable recommendations address these 3 problems.

After using all of this feedback to design the solution, we then conducted user validation research in which all interviewees stated they would use our solution.

BlueDot is committed to ensuring this technology reaches everyone who needs it. We aim to offer this service to NGOs, and health agencies operating in countries with a nominal GDP per capita below 2,000 USD, at no cost to the agencies, NGOs, or the end-users. On a case-by-case basis, we will offer at-cost delivery of this product to NGOs and health agencies in other developing countries. We are committed to delivering a scalable, unified architecture that should suppress cost, ensuring that an at-cost offer is still financially viable for many countries and those users in vulnerable situations.

Beyond access to this technology, we aim to share the primary knowledge collected from this solution with the public. For data collected in the partnerships above, BlueDot will publish an anonymous, open dataset of travel patterns, health preparation behavior, pre-existing conditions, and exposures to disease risk, no later than 24 months after the collection of these data. These data will be made available for non-commercial use, and these findings will be shared with decision-makers who need them. We will write at least two papers analyzing the pre-existing conditions, and exposures to disease risk, no later than 36 months after beginning the project.

One of the key learnings from our interviews was that travelers don't know what to look for, and where to look for disease prevention information. Existing resources are inaccessible, disorganized, too academic, or too generalized to be able to inform precautionary behaviour within everyday life. Our solution would aim to make disease prevention an effortless task by not only presenting the relevant information to the user but also making it easy to take steps to protect one's health. Thus, all travelers who use the tool would be able to safeguard their health, and the health of the communities they return to.

We recognize there is a pent up demand for travel as a result of the public health measures taken to restrict the spread of COVID-19. However, COVID-19 has proven that travel can be a major driver for disease spread. Thus, facilitating safe travel will not only benefit the individual themselves but the communities they are interacting with as well.

Over the next year, our goal is to build an MVP in collaboration with our delivery partners and users. We will leverage Bluedot's strong relationships with organizations in southeast Asia like The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) to focus on assisting citizens and the millions of travelers within that region. We will build risk models to accurately capture disease prevalence and disease dynamics within this region. Furthermore, we will create a preventative intervention database that will be relevant to and appropriate for citizens and travelers in this region.

After making an impact on users in the region, we will focus on scaling the risk models and preventative intervention database to cater to other regions across the world. While we want to offer our solution at low cost or no cost to NGOs and international development organizations, the scaling phase will be focused on generating revenue through other paid partnerships. Our goal is to become fully self-sufficient by the end of 2 years, where our operational costs are covered by the revenue we generate through delivery partners. Across all partnerships, the end-user will never incur any cost.

We aim to conduct product development in close collaboration with our users and delivery partners. In the same way that we have collected feedback from end-users during the discovery process, we will conduct weekly interviews with users to inform feature development, communication, and design of our solution. Furthermore, we will be assessing metrics through product analytics software to track whether users are completing their to-do list items, sharing them with their co-travelers, or downloading/printing the recommendations. We will also track how many users subscribe to our notifications for alerts on real-time disease risk updates. Our target is to reach 3.5 million users who do at least 1 preventative behavior by year 3.

Through collaborations with our delivery partners, we want to design a solution that requires the lowest effort from our end-users to obtain this information. Thus we will determine low-barrier-to-entry strategies to target the user and maintain easy access to our offerings at any given time. To decide the most appropriate target channel, we will perform a/b testing and experiment with several channels to find the most successful and accessible one.

There are high costs associated with reaching our target audience of travelers. Keeping in mind there are on average 4.5 billion passenger trips per year, it will cost us millions of dollars to target these individuals at scale. We plan to overcome this barrier by collaborating with delivery partners and utilizing their channels to reach our target audience. Through our user research, we collected data on common sources travellers use to manage their travels and formulated ideas for strategic partnerships that will allow us to reach travellers easily.

We plan on leveraging Bluedot's network of airlines, travel booking sites, insurance companies, and accommodation providers to formulate initial partnerships, and then using the snowballing method to reach more partners. We have already started engaging in early conversations with friendly faces about potential partnerships.

Not applicable. BlueDot is an independently operated B-Corporation.

As mentioned previously, there is an urgent need for a solution that provides individuals with personalized, preventative, and actionable recommendations that prevent them from acquiring and spreading infectious diseases. The urgency of the solution requires us to build this solution, and disseminate this solution among users as soon as possible.

We chose to apply to the Trinity challenge as we think this challenge is the perfect way to accelerate our growth and deliver our offerings to the world. Through financial support, we will be able to quickly build our solution and scale to provide impact as soon as possible. Moreover, we hope to rely on the Trinity challenge's network of members, who are global leaders in the private, academic, and public sectors, for support and advice so we can further the quality of our offerings.

Bluedot is well equipped from a technical perspective but could benefit from legal and contractual support in developing robust and responsible data sharing or data partnership agreements. There are a number of Trinity members that we think could help in this domain, including Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, McKinsey and Company, Microsoft, and Legal and General.

We feel that these organizations will have incredibly valuable experience in working directly with governments to partner on important and ethical data projects. We believe that mutually beneficial partnerships are important to our ability to answer complex public health problems. Having collaborators with experience in structuring these types of data partnerships would help further accelerate our ability to integrate these important data sources while giving back to our data partners and the global public health community.