Vibesdoc

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 struggled to get a hold of such diseases.

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 in 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.

Vibesdoc is a patient engagement tool for prompt diagnosis using patients' case information gathered from a survey & rapid home tests with an AI backend. This tool computes the probability of a diagnostic given a patient's case variables leveraging large data sets to increase accuracy.  Although initially focused on COVID-19, the same code with few alterations can also improve other rapid tests' accuracy for other contagious diseases.

With Vibesdoc's survey results matching patient symptoms with diagnosis, we would promptly identify diseases and provide users with suggestions on practitioners and institutions for treatment. It would also suggest further tests to verify diagnosis possibilities and an alert stating the urgency of treatment required. The results would also be displayed in an explainable visual manner to help people understand what their symptoms might be correlating and help them understand their physicians' suggestions, thus increasing their participation in treatment.

The current target market would be the low-hanging fruit for the capabilities of our solution. Nevertheless, because many women from Central America & Caribbean urban centres are already used to taking rapid tests (for pregnancy, for example), then providing them with tools to get tested for more conditions would have a higher probability of catching on. From our survey results, we believe that these initial adopters will also promote such offerings first with their loved ones and then in their communities, as testing is heavily needed in the region regardless.

As institutions, practitioners, and patients start seeing local success examples of prompt disease detection, the solution would gain popularity and impact the entire healthcare system. An autonomous solution that would handle massive testing would also benefit governments from the region to fall back on in case of a future pandemic.

Utilising already FDA-approved lateral flow assays would also provide an option to provide testing in remote areas of the Americas when needed as those are relatively low-cost and easily shippable. Pairing such results with our survey would increase their reliability and utilise the ability to be further integrated with patient medical records.

Our COVID-focused app (http://testforcov19.org) and the core team that made it possible remain as advisors and believers in the mission.

Our team has already achieved success in increasing the accuracy of Covid lateral flow assays. We increased the accuracy of tests from 70% to 86% using big data to correlate patient answers from a survey to unidentifiable case data. For this project, we would shoot for doing the same for all rapid tests for contagious diseases. The algorithms developed and tweaked in this project will recommend patients appropriately to the right practitioner to alleviate their symptoms.

The current Vibesdoc market is relatively small as it has been running as a Pilot for a couple of clinics and patients in Guatemala to further learn about patient, physician and system interaction. However, the possibilities are much more significant. Vibesdoc is designed for scale with a robust architecture utilising Facebook's react framework for the front end 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. Through Vibesdoc, we envision users constantly screened and tested for conditions whenever they feel unwell and want help. This tool will be an excellent add-on for practitioners, clinics, insurance companies, medical labs, and the entire supply chain. Vibesdoc optimises the whole patient flow for efficiency with the help of passed medical cases.