Patient-Controlled Rare Disease Data Bank

1) Improving the rare disease patient diagnostic journey – reducing the time, cost, resources, and duplicative travel and testing for patients and caregivers

2) Enhancing efficiencies in clinical trials and research, including data collection and sharing

According to the NIH, of the around 10,000 known rare diseases, just 5% of them have FDA-approved treatments, leaving millions of patients around the world scrambling for answers. 

One of the major challenges in treating rare diseases stems from their limited prevalence and the existence of numerous DNA mutations. This recurring issue is compounded by the rarity of these diseases resulting in small numbers of individuals being affected and the gathering of insufficient data.

The solution is collecting better data, globally – and then making it available to researchers.  Our solution enables anonymized data to easily flow downstream from patient to researcher so that more effective therapies may be developed.

 The intrinsic qualities of rare diseases also prevent many drug companies from investing funds into rare disease treatments, leaving researchers with access to very limited data sets and difficulties in securing adequate resources. This further hinders the possibility of conducting widespread clinical trials, and thereby developing truly accurate and statistically significant research.

Rare diseases often have complex and poorly understood characteristics that are accompanied by limited comprehensive research. Many rare diseases exhibit a wide range of symptoms that frequently overlap with other conditions, often leading to misdiagnosis or delayed diagnosis. Consequently, this results in the development of insufficient treatments. Not only is rare disease data often limited, but they are also static in nature. 

As a result, the inability to assess and adapt to the constant and rapid changes in disease hinders efforts to effectively respond to and mitigate evolving health challenges. Without dynamic and up-to-date health data, our understanding and research of diseases become outdated, ultimately leading to the inefficient allocation of resources as well as the inability to track emerging patterns, identify high-risk populations, and implement preventative safety measures.

Perhaps one of the most overlooked populations when it comes to overall health statistics are those in remote areas and Low and Low Middle-Income Countries (LMIC) populations. According to the World Health Organization, there are currently over 100 million refugees worldwide, a number that has only grown within the past 15 years. Regardless of location, crisis, or background, all refugees alike suffer from the same inequality: a lack of basic healthcare. 

Given the high cost of medical care and the limitation of resources in refugee and low-resource settings, it is essential to gather data for evaluating adverse health and primary care treatment outcomes. Unfortunately, there is little data and data analysis available to analyze in these settings. The lack of adequate resources for clinics and physicians in LMIC settings to even detect and document rare diseases means that potentially millions of rare diseases are continuously going undetected.

Our proposal is for a Patient-Controlled Rare Disease Data Bank.  Patient-Controlled means exactly that:  Patients control who has access to their anonymized data, under what circumstances, for what specific purposes, and for how long.

Think of this as Spotify for medical data, where researchers are the users and patients are the artists.  Patients will have control over what data is deposited into the Data Bank.  Basic medical information about themselves and their rare disease, test results, sequenced DNA, etc.

Researchers will be able to query the Rare Disease Data Bank and learn how many patients fit their search criteria.  They can then request access to the anonymized data and, if the patient approves, add the data to their playlist - using the data for an agreed-upon length of time.  And, they will be notified as new data becomes available.

While we are building the Patient-Controlled Rare Disease Data Bank for rare diseases, our approach is applicable to all medical conditions.  The more global the data, the greater our collective understanding of the rare disease, the more effective are therapies developed – and the greater the benefits for everyone.

Non-profit, university and government researchers will pay a nominal subscription fee to access the data.  For-profit researchers will pay a larger annual subscription fee, plus small royalties – both of which will be used to fund Universal Health Insurance and, potentially, Universal Basic Income, in Low- and Low Middle-Income Countries.

Despite the United States leading global spending on healthcare, identifying and treating rare diseases remains a significant challenge. These challenges are further exacerbated in low-income and refugee settings where access to data, treatments, and resources is severely limited. 

Renowned global sources, including the WEF, UN, and the WHO, reveal that approximately half of the world’s population lack access to essential health services, leaving them without the means to even obtain diagnoses for rare diseases. 

Frontida’s mission targets these low-resource areas that are often unaccounted for in rare diseases and global health data, enhancing efficiency in all healthcare systems worldwide.

Building upon our existing presence in seven different low-income countries around the world (Panama, Greece, Ukraine, Romania, The Gambia, Afghanistan, and Jordan), we will begin implementing our rare disease module within the communities we already operate in, and will continue to do so in our future work. 

This advancement will foster greater accessibility to data from previously marginalized populations while also bolstering research accuracy, and empowering researchers to make well-informed health decisions. We envision a new flow of data and information that will easily transfer between patients and researchers, allowing for the mutual benefit as follows.

Increased transparency of health information will allow for improved patient care and health outcomes. An interconnected system enables the seamless sharing of patient information amongst different providers, ensuring that relevant healthcare professionals will have access to patient medical histories and test results. 

This is crucial in refugee areas, our areas of focus, where paper health records are highly vulnerable to misplacement or loss. By leveraging this feature, we can address the need for a mobile and secure system that effectively tracks and stores vital health information. 

And by consentingly sharing health data, patients will receive more accurate diagnoses for rare diseases while also actively contributing to the development of effective rare disease treatments. Access to personal comprehensive health records will provide patients with the ability to review their medical history, track test results, and be constantly informed of their health status. Patients can then participate in a more proactive role in managing their personal health.

Researchers and biotech/pharmaceutical companies will also directly benefit as they will gain access to comprehensive and diverse data. This enables healthcare providers, research institutions, and public health agencies to analyze and compare rare disease patterns. 

The seamless collaboration across varying institutions and geographic locations grants researchers with easy access to observe existing findings, contribute to shared databases, and expand their expertise on rare diseases. Greater communication limits the potential for duplicated research, allowing for improved efficiency, the optimization of resource allocations, and the implementation of practical applications. 

Researchers will also have access to directly communicate with certain potential research subjects to facilitate more representative studies and findings, allowing for greater generalizability and applicability. A constantly updating system will promote real-time data analysis and surveillance by giving researchers the ability to monitor trends, identify patterns, and contrast preventative treatment options, a crucial feature for timely public health emergencies.

Frontida Records is a non-profit software company providing easy-to-use, easy-to modify Electronic Health Record (EHR) software that helps healthcare and humanitarian aid workers serving on the front lines in Low and Low Middle Income Countries (LMIC), and refugee camps.

We are a diverse team of medical experts, engineers, and people experienced in humanitarian aid.  Our Board of Directors are physicians, researchers, lawyers, CEOs, engineers, and business consultants.

Two-thirds of our team members are people of color, and we are gender-balanced.

Our racial, ethnic, gender, and geographic identities make us particularly equipped to work with underserved communities that look a lot like we do. 

Our team leaders all have experience working and volunteering in LMIC and always work closely with the local teams on the ground. The diversity of our team, combined with our vast and concerted effort to learn about these communities (including their native language and cultural customs) allows us to successfully plan and execute our work.

This is particularly important for the low-resource areas we serve where few people have regular access to basic health services and paper records (if any) are the standard of care.  In The Republic of the Gambia, for example, there are fewer than 300 doctors for nearly 2 million people!

Our flexible software is suited for refugee and LMIC communities because it allows us to seamlessly integrate each communities’ unique input, ideas, and workflows. The Frontida system is offered in multiple languages and can add specific rare diseases, diagnoses, and medical forms that are relevant and culturally important to the communities served. 

For Floating Doctors, our medical partner serving remote Panamanian island villages, we created an EHR with specific mental health assessments, drug lists, and treatment plans that are culturally relevant to both their medical teams and patients. 

Our software has supported healthcare and humanitarian aid organizations in Afghanistan, Greece, Panama, Poland, and Ukraine. 

The Horizon Prize will enable Frontida to build the Patient-Controlled Rare Disease Data Bank, integrate it into our Electronic Health Record software platform, and work collaboratively with researchers around the world.  We'll hire a full-time Researcher to compliment our team of over 30 volunteers. 

We need MIT’s technical support to support our efforts of ensuring that our systems are effective in functionality and are legal in conduct. We currently have 11 waitlisted clinics that are seeking our services. Since our team is small and composed primarily of volunteers, we can only serve four regions. We aim to onboard clinics in accordance with our mission statement, centered on diversity and inclusion. MIT’s large social network will help spread publicity of our services with the hope of expanding our EHR to be used in 25 hospitals and clinics in the next year. 

Moreover, Frontida has and will continue accepting clinics regardless of their ability to pay for our services. Thus, the Horizon Prize award will bolster our Frontida Commitment Fund, our version of financial aid for our clients who need our support. Funding from this Challenge will also support our general business operations, which currently are taxed as a small, non-profit startup. These operations include legal & insurance, research & development, and cloud storage support, etc.

Scott Armanini is a two-time cancer survivor dedicating his remaining years to improving our human condition - at scale.  Prior to joining Frontida Records, Scott taught Entrepreneurship at USC's Jimmy Iovine and Andre (Dr. Dre) Young Academy for the Arts, Technology and Business of Innovation -- where he learned of Frontida's origin story (see the PBS Documentary, Lives Not Grades) https://www.pbs.org/show/lives-not-grades/

Before joining USC's faculty, Scott spent 30 years in tech and venture capital - bringing emerging technologies to market, at scale.

Frontida Records:  EHR for the Next 7 Billion!

In a study published in the NIH’s National Libary of Medicine, researchers from the Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences observed that major socioeconomic challenges of rare disease management include the geographical dispersion of patients and specialists, lack of consistency and integrity of studies, and limited information and knowledge due to diverse data. They suggested that the “development of an integrated information system for rare diseases, for example, at a national level could help to eliminate part of the challenges experienced due to information restrictions”, which will “improve data quality and the interoperability of systems.”

The ingenuity of our system is that it takes these issues into account by standardizing rare disease data into one comprehensive DNA database. Existing rare disease databases are limited in scope and are inherently biased toward Western data: only Western systems and specialists can diagnose and track rare disease patterns. By expanding our system to be catered specifically to LMIC communities, researchers are granted with higher statistical significance leading to increased precision and generalizability when making critical health decisions. With the ability to visualize patterns of rare diseases, both researchers and individuals diagnosed with such diseases can better understand the characteristics and variability of thousands of rare diseases. Our solution is unique in our mission to provide access to health to all regardless of any status. Our connections and existing EHRs within LMIC settings enable our solution to pave the way for healthcare to be truly inclusive of all populations, allowing us to strive towards being a universal standard for healthcare. We also take pride in knowing that patients of this database will be in control of their own health data, not researchers or publications. 

In a research brief conducted by Health Affairs, it was found that clinical waste accounted for 5-15.7% of the US’s national health spending, with significant contributors being failures in care delivery and coordination. We hope that by improving managerial efficiency, waste is reduced in researching, testing, communication, manufacturing, and other by-products. In the numerous areas where our EHRs have been implemented, local clinics and hospitals have transitioned out of outdated paper records which were unable to be easily shared amongst different healthcare providers, lacked organization, were inefficient, and promoted wastage of valuable clinic resources. By adopting our EHRs, not only is paper consumption reduced, but the strain on healthcare facilities with limited resources is also minimized, ensuring that resources are being optimally allocated. As for our rare disease module, environmental sustainability is derived as a positive externality from increased efficiency. Our module eliminates the environmental consequences and costs of moving and transporting data by easily implementing them within the local clinics we already work in. This mitigates excessive travel for training and surveying while maintaining effective methods of research and communication. Furthermore, our inventory and supply-chain tracking features enable optimal stock management to streamline healthcare systems and minimize waste. Our model is that increased overall communication decreases both financial and environmental waste.

Year 1  

We will continue to customize and improve our EHR to meet the specific needs of our current patients and clinicians around the world. We want to use the funding to ensure the functioning of our foundational features and develop the rare disease module that this challenge requires. We will work directly with local clinics and hospitals to focus on data collection and analysis in Panama, The Gambia, and Uganda. We will evaluate our software’s ability to collect data and analyze efficiency and quality of care measures.

First 6 Months:

1. Design and develop rare disease modules into existing EHRs

2. Beta-testing with partners.

3. The official launch of rare diseases system with 6 months of data collection.

6-12 Months

1. Work on software development so that it is rare disease research-friendly, add research questions to the EHR in consultation with the funding agencies, healthcare administrators, medical school faculty, and local physicians, and improve back-end capability for searching and analysis. 

2. Hire a data analyst to study the back-end data and generate reports.

Year 2  

We will compile the aggregate data collected and create a formal report on our findings, bolstering reporting and analysis. The report is aimed to inform public health officials on policies and services that will best serve rare disease patients in the LMIC settings we work in. The data collected in our system will be used to identify optimal approaches and efficiently reallocate the supply of health goods and services. Our work focuses on different indigenous populations to increase the generalizability of our reports. By expanding within our LMIC partners and clients first, we can test the functionality of our rare disease module.

Actions:

1. Query at the end of the year the rates, types, symptoms, and health outcomes of rare diseases that are documented in our systems.

2. Determine what % of patients had follow-up visits to assess health improvement.

3. Develop rare disease reports for clinics, patient communities, and funding agencies. Evaluate the research capability of Frontida’s software and improve the software for back-end analysis. Upload data to a custom-built interconnected health database. 

Years 3-5  

Frontida will supply yearly reports on our findings to address the SOLVE challenge of measuring rare disease healthcare outcomes and its impact on optimizing efficiency and mitigating waste. We will begin expanding and distributing our database for more widespread use.

Actions:

1. Optimize the software for evaluating effectiveness.

2. License our product and grant access to the database to various research institutions and health officials

3. Work with health officials to compare differences in rare diseases, examine demographic differences in outcomes, and impact of funding level vs. quality of care. 

4. Collaborate with medical and engineering school faculty advisors to publish data in peer-reviewed journals.

5. Conduct an environmental conservation study to determine the amount of prevented waste.

The goal of our project is to increase documentation, knowledge, and awareness of patients with rare diseases to better treat and monitor patients. We aim to provide public health officials with the necessary information needed to treat rare disease populations

Goal: Increase functions on Frontida’s existing EHRs to create a rare disease database that can be used to optimize communication and improve rare disease diagnostic journeys at clinics in low-resource settings.

Inputs:

1. Frontida EHR and new rare disease tracking module.

2. Frontida Records team works to train personnel, increase clientele, develop and improve rare disease tracking technology, and ensure efficient transmission of data into our database.

3. A medical team in the local areas we work in who are trained on how to use and analyze data collected from the EHR.

4. Materials such as input devices (computer, cellphone, iPad) and connectivity at clinic headquarters.

Actions and Activities:

1. Provide low-cost EHR for documenting rare disease health history for clinical care.

2. Develop a searchable database that is stored on the cloud and on-site servers for future data analysis.

3. Develop a research team to analyze rare disease data, i.e. search patient age, ethnicity, sex, diagnosis, treatment, immunization records, vitals, success rates, and follow-up visits rate.

4. EHR automatically outputs actionable data that is constantly updated to address the needs of individual sites and inform health researchers and officials.

5. Build in research-related questions in consultation with Challenge, WHO, and NGO stakeholders.

Specific Outputs for SOLVE Challenge:

1. EHR, including the rare disease module, is used to care for patients with rare diseases at the test site and is scalable.

2. Primary measure using no follow-up approach: Identify the effectiveness of diagnosing rare diseases during patient visits.

3. Corroborate outcomes with stored low-tech quantitative measures, ie. height, weight, vital signs, immunization records, rare disease symptoms, and notes.

4. Data analysis to improve primary care and measure patterns of rare diseases.

• Identify rates, types, symptoms, and health outcomes of rare diseases.

• Identify the percent of improvement of medical conditions and symptoms in medical appointments.

• Annual reports are made to NGO funding agencies, site clinics, research institutions, and medical directors to evaluate the impact of rare disease diagnostics and help clinics allocate resources.

• Collect patient and physician feedback to help Frontida EHR improve the software.

Outcomes:

1. Change the behavior of clinicians to switch from paper records to EHRs.

2. Data leads to changes in practice or protocols to make care more efficient and cost-effective.

3. Patient health information is searchable, secure, and backed up on the cloud.

4. Data analysis yields useful and more inclusive data to clinicians and research agencies on recognizing and comparing trends in quality of care.

5. Healthcare officials track rare disease patterns and make informed crucial public health decisions.

Impact:

1. Frontida continues its mission to serve clinics in low-income countries and low-resource settings.

2. No patient is left behind. Frontida serves all patients by creating health documentation systems tailored to the need of patients with rare diseases and their healthcare teams.

3. Frontida Records expands EHR capabilities to establish an all-inclusive system. 

4. Data is used by researchers to improve rare disease care in both low-resource settings and scale resources and knowledge to similar organizations and the general public.

5. Digital documentation reduces paper waste and efficiency mitigates negative environmental externalities.

Our Theory of Change:  Improve rare disease diagnosis and care in low and middle-income nations (LMIC).

For the theory of change, the important outcome is whether rare diseases can be effectively diagnosed and whether the accumulated data can be managed and dispersed. This in turn could create a market for affordable EHRs that are used in low-income countries or resource-poor settings while increasing rare disease transparency and improving our understanding, and thus care, of hundreds if not thousands of rare diseases. In this section, we will address why we believe we can achieve the link between outputs and outcomes. 

1. We meet regularly with the existing clinics we implement our EHRs and listen to the clinicians and the patient communities via Zoom and in person. We have been told that rare diseases are an area of concern for the clinics we work with.

2. Our team will meet continuously with the communities that utilize our EHRs and rare disease modules. We field-test a first draft of the EHR and its functions and then work on improvements to make sure our customers are satisfied with the product they use.

3. Frontida software is versatile and can be used in different global sites with different needs and demographics such as clinics serving indigenous populations living in remote areas of Panama, The Gambia, and Uganda. Our rare disease module is just one of the many prospective additions to our system that will promote our system to become a universalized system.

4. We have been collecting our data in Excel format which is user-friendly and easy to search and group for data analysis.  We are already conducting preliminary studies on clinic efficiency using the Frontida EHR database for our Panama client. Our EHR saved 2.65 hours of documentation and transcription time by the Floating Doctors per day. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/w9clxxy8coqaf79/Floating%20Doctors%20Timekeeping%20Results%20%281%29.pdf?dl=0) 

5. Our software is scalable as we have more than 11 clinics waiting to use our product. Our product has the potential to have vastly more capabilities to be efficient for all LMIC clinics. 

6. There is a vast market and need for one interconnected health information system that will enable continuous data collection, analysis, and sharing, empowering health officials to adapt, improve, and respond to the constantly changing status of rare diseases.

7. We have faculty advisors at the University of Southern California and other universities in the fields of medicine, dentistry, business, and engineering. We are building collaborations with NGO clients and hopefully with Challenge stakeholders to develop additional measures that are pertinent to supporting a clinic in a low-income nation or in a resource-limited setting. We have a professional board of directors to help us plan our financial sustainability.

Frontida Records is built with core database technology that uses low-code development and is based on a Google Appsheet for faster and cheaper development. This platform allows us to rapidly customize our EHR to the different needs of our partners. Additionally, our software saves data in Excel spreadsheet format for queries and data analysis.  

We leverage low-code and no-code application development platforms to rapidly create digital health documentation solutions for our customers. By using multiple tools, we ensure that we can implement all of our customer’s needs at a fraction of the cost compared to traditional development agencies. These tools allow us to develop our solutions rapidly, in a matter of days, which has also opened our applications to respond to emergency crises in Afghanistan and Ukraine. We can tailor solutions to complex deployments in a matter of hours or days instead of weeks and months.

To ensure Frontida’s data security, the software was developed in consultation with data security agencies and is continuously tested in order to provide data security feedback to our software engineers. 

Currently, Frontida has one full-time staff which is our Executive Director, Scott Armanini. However, our business model is not to have everyone be fully employed. One of our organization’s biggest driving engines is the 30+ passionate volunteers and interns who power Frontida to be able to continuously expand, aiding more and more refugees along the way.

Frontida was founded in 2020 after our founders visited Greece’s largest refugee camp, Camp Moria. There, they discovered the huge gap with inadequate healthcare systems for the refugee populations, which only further contributed to the pile of many basic living necessities that refugees can’t obtain. Since then Frontida has only been able to grow. In terms of our work on rare diseases in specific, we have not been able to make sufficient progress due to the cost and time of implementing, overseeing, and scaling our systems. However, we are hoping to use the funds from MIT Solve to establish a team specifically for rare diseases.

The Frontida Records team believes in and supports MIT and Solve’s mission statement on diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Diversity: We appreciate and leverage the many differences between SOLVE staff and SOLVE’s larger community, and we involve and reflect the various communities we serve through partnership and open innovation. We believe that “everyone should have a seat at the problem-solving table,” as MIT President Reif states. Of our 25-person team, we are proud that over 75% are people of color, and over half are women. 

Equity: We design our policies, practices, and resources with the goal of providing people of all backgrounds with a genuine opportunity to thrive. 

Inclusion: We strive to create an environment in which everyone feels valued and respected. Solve specifically seeks to support social entrepreneurs who use human-centered, inclusive technologies to solve world challenges. We know that when solutions are designed with the most underserved populations in mind, they benefit everyone. That’s why we tailor our platform to uniquely serve each community we work with. Our ultimate goal is to train our clients with the skills onsite to take on the responsibilities that currently our Frontida team of volunteers is carrying out. Doing so would allow members of marginalized communities to become stakeholders in the development of Frontida, gaining skills in software design and business that might be re-applied when they emigrate to another country.  Once Frontida is financially sustainable, our nonprofit could potentially provide the communities we serve with a source of income, bolstering our DEI mission.

These components are part of the linked Social Business Model in question.

Key Partners: Our key partners and stakeholders include the medical and humanitarian aid NGOs, clinics, and governments who can use our technology. We also partner with universities such as the University of Southern California/Keck School of Medicine to help us develop our product. We use Google AppSheet and Workspace as our low-code development tools, AWS for file storage, Vanta for data security monitoring, O’Melveny for legal expertise, Notion and Slack for communication, and Oracle-Netsuite to manage our business operations.

Key Resources: Our key resources include our applications and revenue from our low-cost licensing and development as well as from grants, donations, and foundations. Other resources include customer and donor relationships, security with Vanta, branding, marketing, and strong volunteer, leadership, and the Board of Directors.

Key Activities: Our key activities are to perform needs assessments to understand a clinic’s needs, build custom health applications for medical teams in LMICs, collect user feedback and iterate solutions to optimize products, deploy custom digital health applications like EHRs with partners, provide training and support for applications, and analyze how the EHR is being used.

Cost Structure: Our cost structures include team salaries (although, we also rely heavily on volunteers), platform development/storage/maintenance fees, legal/insurance/security fees, travel expenses when conducting in-person deployments, and the Frontida Fellowship (Our charitable fund allocated to cover costs of clinics in significant financial need).

Revenue: Our revenue comes from our low-cost licensing and development as well as from grants, donations, and foundations.

Channels: Channels for our nonprofit include Frontida members’ personal community and university network, word-of-mouth, referrals, news & article publishings, video marketing, social media platforms (blog, website, Instagram, Linked-In, Facebook), and online forums/community groups.

Segments: The people we are creating value for are the patients in LMIC and the medical teams (clinicians, administrators, etc.) that serve them. We are also creating value for the researchers and public health officials who need data to make health policies and decisions. We also create transparency and effective allocation of funds for funding agencies.

Value Proposition: Our value proposition lies in our ability to help healthcare teams, administrators, researchers, public health officials, and funding agencies improve primary healthcare in LMICs. For healthcare organizations, we improve their efficiency and efficacy through improved data collection, analysis, and interpretation. For healthcare providers, our technology saves time to document and organize operations, thereby reducing stress, improving resource allocation, and improving patient treatments, coordination with different providers, and continuity of care. We are also unique in that we provide an accessible, user-focused team that tailors our health applications to the clinic’s unique needs. For researchers, our data analysis and tracking capabilities can measure primary health indicators. For funding agencies, our platform promotes transparency and legitimacy of work to funders. For donors, we create tax-right-offs for donations and cultivate a community of compassion and support for people in LMICs.

Although the benefits of an EHR are making EHRs essential to mainstream medical care in the Western world, EHRs were created for profit and are prohibitively expensive for medical clinics in LMIC nations and in refugee settings to purchase and maintain. For example, the VA hospitals paid $16 billion to pay for EHR services from Cerner in 2019. The Mayo Clinic paid Epic $1.5 billion for its EHR in 2016. The University of Vermont paid $151 million to Epic EHR in 2017. Moreover, these EHRs are cumbersome and impractical in refugee clinics as the log-in time alone would slow down the flow of patients. We created Frontida to help Europe’s largest refugee camp, Camp Moria, function after their clinic and paper charts were lost in a fire and offered it to the NGOs for free. Our second client, Floating Doctors, voluntarily paid Frontida $10,000 after we field-tested it in the jungles of Panama. We believe that governments and NGOs that fund medical relief in refugee camps want to know how their funds are used and whether their clinics are improving primary care, the basis of the SOLVE challenge. Our primary goal for financial sustainability is to create an affordable EHR alternative for low-income countries and for NGOs and governments responding to the refugee crisis. But we are always trying to improve and expand the realms of our systems and their capabilities to allow for more widespread and efficient healthcare. Using the revenue gained from our EHRs to develop a module for rare diseases is just one part of this process to expand beyond the basic functions of our system. Given what companies have been spending on Western EHRs, we know the healthcare market is shifting toward digitization. But we want to be proactive in establishing a new cost-efficient norm with the hope of our systems eventually becoming a health industry standard, first within LMIC populations, but hopefully expanding to all clinics around the world. Please see below five of our competitor’s costs for providing EHR services.

1. The U.S. Veterans Affairs Department finalized a contract with Cerner in May 2018, awarding the EHR vendor $10 billion over 10 years to put the VA on the same records system as the U.S. Defense Department. The 10-year contract was increased in 2019 to $16 billion.

1. Mayo Clinic in early 2016 announced plans to move to an Epic EHR system, costing the Rochester, Minn.-based health system more than $1.5 billion over five years.

1. NYC Health + Hospitals began rolling out its $1 billion Epic EHR across its New York City-based hospital network in 2018.

1. Worcester, Mass.-based UMass Memorial Health Care in 2017 invested $700 million into a new Epic EHR system.

1. Edmonton, Canada-based Alberta Health Services, the sole health authority for Alberta, signed a $459 million agreement to deploy an Epic EHR system in September 2017.

In 2020, Frontida received $5,000 from Blackstone/TechStar Investment Company, a fellowship committed to inspiring entrepreneurship globally; and $10,000 from the Iovine and Young Academy Social Impact Prize Competition, a USC competition showcasing innovations to improve society or revolutionize an industry. 

In 2021, we were granted $5,000 in legal fees from the Maseeh Engineering Prize Competition, a USC competition for engineers addressing challenges in energy, health, safety, education, and our environment. 

In 2022, we were awarded $40,000 from the Westly Prize Competition, a competition for social innovators in California, and $16,500 from the New Venture Seed Competition, USC's largest venture competition. 

Most recently, we won over $17,000 in credits from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and $25,000 from Microsoft to help scale our systems. 

We also won a competition by the National Academy of Engineering which gave the winners access to NAE members for mentorship and National Science Foundation workshops for product development. 

Our non-profit was granted a physical office space in Marina Del Rey from USC's Viterbi Start-Up Garage. 

Our team has also won awards and recognition from the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the USC Marshall School of Business, 

We also established corporate partners with Google Appsheet to help us develop our low-code software, with Oracle/NetSuite to organize and manage our business software, and with Vanta to develop data security, monitoring, and protocols.

We have academic advisors at USC Viterbi School of  Engineering, USC Keck School of Medicine, USC Ostrow School of Dentistry, USC Marshall School of Business and USC Jimmy Iovine & Andre (Dr. Dre) Young Academy for the Arts, Technology and Business of Innovation. Our Board of Directors includes CEOs, physicians, lawyers, engineers, and business consultants from PwC, EY, and Deloitte.