Ada for rare diseases

There are 300 million people living with rare diseases worldwide. Unfortunately, for these individuals, gaining a diagnosis can be incredibly difficult. The average time to diagnosis for a rare disease is more than five years, and the average patient will attend at least five appointments in that time. This puts undue strain and cost on the individual and health services around the world. 

Undiagnosed rare diseases are a huge burden, both on patients and health systems alike. Without access to the right treatments, a patient’s quality of life can be severely negatively impacted. The uncertainty caused by not knowing what is wrong can also lead to psychological, physiological, and financial challenges as the affected individual seeks to understand their disease and has to pay for care while doing so. In some cases, the financial burden can also fall on the caregivers who may be forced to leave their employment to focus on the provision of care full time. Patients may even be subjected to incorrect treatments and unnecessary operations in an attempt to address symptoms without addressing the true underlying cause - putting the patient at further risk. 

The cost of rare diseases to healthcare systems is also huge. A study undertaken in 2021 found that “pediatric and adult discharges with rare diseases show substantially higher health-care utilization compared to discharges with common condition diagnoses, accounting for nearly half of the US national bill.”

Ada is an AI-based symptom assessment tool built by doctors, clinicians, and technology experts to help people better understand their symptoms and navigate healthcare systems appropriately. Ada’s medical knowledge base covers all common diseases and hundreds of rare diseases. With over 12 million users worldwide, and 27 million completed assessments, Ada reaches a significant segment of the global population enabling it to achieve positive impact at scale.

Ada can help its users understand and identify rare disease symptoms by suggesting potential causes following a brief interview via chatbot - which works in much the same way as a conversation with a doctor would. Ada, however, is able to overcome human limitations when providing its suggestions, such as the ability to rapidly draw on its vast medical knowledge base while avoiding availability heuristics, enabling faster detection of potential rare diseases. Ada’s suggestions then empower users to better navigate healthcare systems, helping them communicate their issues to caregivers more effectively and seek out the right specialists to expedite diagnosis and treatment. A retrospective  study aimed at evaluating the potential of Ada’s accuracy in recognizing rare inflammatory systemic diseases found that 89.2% of Ada’s top suggestions matched the patient’s confirmed diagnosis, and that 33.3% of participants could have received the correct rare disease diagnosis in their first documented clinical visit had they used the Ada app.  

Ada is a solution for everyone. We are on a mission to improve health outcomes for a billion people worldwide. We support individuals with high medical quality advice and guidance to help them through their health journeys more efficiently and effectively - often reducing times to diagnosis, alleviating the stresses of navigating healthcare systems, and ultimately improving quality of life. For clinicians and healthcare systems, we save time and money by reducing the costs associated with misdiagnosis of rare diseases, through no fault of the healthcare professional. 

We have employed over 250 team members, 60 of which are in-house medical professionals that continue to develop and improve our proprietary reasoning engine and extensive medical knowledge base. They cover a range of specialties including obs/gynae, mental health and paediatrics. We have build a highly diverse team, coming from more than +70 countries, to help address the bias issues that you see in some other platforms. We engage closely with patients and the rare disease community through user testing and dedicated studies to gather feedback and continuously refine our solution. 

The challenge will help us raise awareness not only for rare diseases more widely, but also for how Ada’s medical AI can support in closing the diagnostic gap. With greater public awareness, we can reach more people and enable the early detection of rare diseases, transforming healthcare journeys, outcomes and experiences for patients. By driving rare-disease awareness through this challenge, Ada Health accelerates the discovery of rare disease and helps users the appropriate healthcare needed to address his or her condition.

Ada is able to support its users in this way because it has, from the beginning, demonstrated a strong commitment to the inclusion of rare diseases in its medical knowledge base. It can be difficult for both physicians and AI systems to recognize rare diseases due to the often unspecific symptoms, and the necessity to diagnose them by differentiation. By focusing on these issues from the outset, Ada has been able to gather significant data such that it already covers hundreds of rare diseases. To ensure continual improvements to this data bank, Ada also works closely with life science partners and independent experts from the healthcare community to build more rare diseases into its medical knowledge base. Most recently, Ada has been working with leading physicians and scientists to model Familial Mediterranean Fever (FMF) and lysosomal storage diseases such as Gaucher, Fabry and Pompe.

We are on a mission to improve health outcomes for a billion people worldwide. Through collaborations with key stakeholders such as governments, payers, health providers and non-profits we will roll out our solution at large scale by integrating into local health systems, making our medical AI as accessible as possible for everyone. 

We believe that raising awareness is key to combating rare diseases. Using our social media channels, Ada undertakes regular activities to inform its thousands of followers worldwide of the symptoms, risks, and potential treatment options for rare diseases. In collaboration with its life science partners, Ada also undertakes joint awareness initiatives leveraging its advanced AI capabilities and its partner’s reach to help people find out more about rare diseases and ultimately shorten the time to diagnosis for as many patients as possible. Ada was recently integrated into Novartis’s awareness website for FMF, enabling people who may be living with the disease to find out more about their symptoms.

# Number of people reached 

# Assessments completed

# time saved through early detection for users as well as health care practitioners 

• Ada’s health assessment technology is based on a custom-built reasoning engine and a comprehensive medical knowledgebase, developed over eight years by our team of engineers, scientists and clinicians. 

• Ada doesn’t provide a diagnosis, rather, it reviews multiple pieces of data and provides a probabilistic assessment based on what it thinks might be wrong. 

• Because it is able to take into account all the available information, Ada can consider reported symptoms, medical history, risk factors, and more, and make a personalised health assessment, suggesting the most likely causes for a user’s symptoms.

• Ada’s health assessment technology is based on a custom-built reasoning engine and a comprehensive medical knowledgebase, developed over eight years by our team of engineers, scientists and clinicians, delivering the most sophisticated diagnostic assessments on the market. 

• Ada doesn’t provide a diagnosis. Rather, it reviews multiple pieces of data and provides a probabilistic assessment that suggests possible causes for symptoms and the likelihood of each based on the available information, and drawing upon a global medical knowledgebase 

• Because it is able to take into account all the available information, Ada can consider reported symptoms, medical history, risk factors, and more, and make a personalised health assessment, suggesting the most likely causes for a user’s symptoms.

• We put the highest value on the quality and on the safety of Ada’s assessment, and continue to focus on expanding Ada’s capabilities to provide the most impact for our users.

• We’re constantly benchmarking Ada’s reasoning through internal stress testing using real-world clinical case scenarios, competitive comparisons, medical collaborations, external independent review, and user feedback.

Recognizing the demand for Ada’s technology in low- and lower-middle-income countries, Ada’s Global Health Initiative was launched in 2018. The Global Health Initiative focuses on the implementation of Ada’s AI in low-resource settings to increase access to personalized health information and improve primary health care delivery for those who need it most. Through previous work in collaboration with Fondation Botnar, Ada’s medical knowledge base has already been localized for the East African setting. Ada has also been translated into Swahili and will provide 1.5 million Tanzanians with access to Ada’s technology by 2022. As a consequence, Ada, has a strong foundation that can be further built upon to further tailor our technology to address the healthcare challenges across Sub-Saharan Africa. 

• B2B Saas Model 
• B2G Collaborations 

Our commercial models B2B and B2G are up and running