WIRED Health is our annual exploration of the ever-changing world of healthcare, featuring leading technologists, entrepreneurs and innovators in sectors from robotics to virtual reality. For all our coverage from the event, head over to our WIRED Health hub.
The Bupa Startup Stage at WIRED Health 2016 showcased entrepreneurs and innovators at the cutting edge of medicine and health.
Eighteen startups pitched for nine minutes to four judges – Simon Nicholls, Director of Global Digital Health at Bupa, Tara Donnelly, Managing Director of the Health Innovation Network, Luc Dandurand, Head of ICT Applications at the International Telecommunication Union, and me – for the prize of speaking in the last slot on the main stage.
As well as shining the spotlight on some spectacular individual innovations, the session also provided an overview of larger trends in healthcare innovation. Notable among them: the attempt to automate the interaction between patients and healthcare professionals.
By turning aspects of the process over to machines – whether mobile apps or virtual avatars – these startups promise to save doctors, nurses and surgeons time and hospitals and insurers money.
STARTUP STAGE WINNER: SENSELY
• Founded: 2013 • Founders: Adam Odessky, Ivana Schnur • Location: San Francisco
How do you get people to the right point in the healthcare system, whether that's to A&E or to the chemist to buy an aspirin? Sensely automates the process of finding out by connecting people to a virtual nurse called Olivia.
The machine learning-powered nurse, known in the US as Molly, can diagnose your symptoms, give you advice on treatment and help you schedule an appointment. Olivia will also chat to you with what Sensely co-founder Ivana Schnur describes as "an old-fashioned bedside manner", whether that’s in English, Spanish or, Mandarin (the robot speaks all three, as well as 24 other languages). "It is really difficult to form an emotional attachment to an app," says Schnur. "The moment you have an avatar that speaks [you can make a connection]."
Chair of Judges, Bupa's Director of Global Digital Health Simon Nicholls, was impressed by Sensely's technological range and its potential for widescale deployment. "The animated avatar nurse provides a more immersive and interactive experience than other remote healthcare solutions I've seen in the past," he says. "You can not only see its potential in Western markets where consumers are demanding more personalised and convenient healthcare services, but also in developing markets where getting access to medical support can often be extremely challenging."
San Franscisco-based Sensely is being given a six-month trial in the UK by the company which runs 111, the NHS service for non-emergency calls. "This is one of the services that is probably the most ready for disruption," says Schnur. “There are probably 37,000 calls a day to 111 and each of those calls cost anywhere from £10 to £13. Seventy per cent of those calls are handled by a health advisor, a clinical professional that has about three weeks of training and is using the same type of algorithm or similar type of algorithm as Olivia to determine what the outcome is going to be."
Olivia can perform the same service "for a fraction of the cost," Schnur says. "That is a significant saving for the 111 service."
TECKEL MEDICAL
• Founded: 2011 • Founder: Cristian Pascual • Location: Barcelona
Teckel Medical tackles the same problem as Sensely, but instead of using a virtual avatar it asks people to tap out their enquiries into a "WhatsApp style" messaging app. The Spanish company has created MEDIKTOR, a mobile app that connects people to the most appropriate clinical specialist.
Using machine learning and natural language processing, MEDIKTOR’s chatbot can talk to you "in your own words," according to founder Christian Pascual. Once it has found the right person for you to talk to, it connects you to them using the same interface – so the whole conversation can be conducted with instant messenger.
Currently undergoing clinical tests in a Barcelona A&E department, Teckel Medical claims to be serving over 300,000 users, mostly in Latin American countries. Although MEDIKTOR can be used by anyone, Pascual says his real focus is insurance companies and hospitals. "We can save them a lot of money," says Pascual. "If you’re first step is the right step, you can save at least €25 with each use."
HEALTHRHYTHMS
• Founded: 2016 • Founders: Mark Matthews, Tanzeem Choudhury, Carlos Rodarte • Location: Cambridge, MA
"Right now, the gold standard for measuring mental health is self-reported paper-based questionnaires," says Mark Matthews, co-founder and chief design officer of HealthRhythms. The Boston-based startup aims to digitise this process – not by making questionnaires digital, but by collecting so much information it can make measurement "invisible and continuous".
By gathering data using its mobile app – a process that involves reading emails, tracking sleep and movement, even listening to conversations – HealthRhythms builds up a picture of the behaviours and routines of each individual subject. Its machine learning algorithms can then assess if they're running into difficulty, even before they’re aware of it themselves. "There's less face-to-face interaction with the health system," says Matthews, "but [people] receive continuous care through automatic suggestions or if necessary you can escalate up through to care manager and clinician."
With this amount of personal data in its system, HealthRhythms' security could be a concern, but Matthews assures WIRED that all analysis is conducted on the phone: "we automatically process it and destroy the contents." The startup, which currently has a pilot at Cornell University, will have 10,000 people using its system in 2016.
MYRECOVERY
• Founded: 2016 • Founders: Thomas Harte, Axel Sylvan • Location: London
When orthopedic surgeon Thomas Harte began feeling some back pain, he went to have a CT scan, where he was shown a large white patch in the centre of his left kidney. He had a kidney stone 23 cm wide – when his kidney was only 11 cm.
Six months and six operations later, the kidney stone had been removed, and Harte was slowly rehabilitating, but even though he was a trained surgeon – who had been operated on at the centre he worked at – he didn't know what he should be doing during his recovery. Looking around, he realised that no-one else did either. "67 per cent of all surgical patients don't know what they can and cannot do post-op. 55 per cent either misinterpret or don't understand what they’ve been told. The experience is pretty poor. It's also grossly inefficient."
In early 2016, Harte and his fellow surgeon Axel Sylvan founded MyRecovery, a B2B mobile app to guide orthopedic surgery patients (mainly hip and knee replacements) through every aspect of their treatment, all the way from the decision to operate through to the end of rehab. Patients, who download the app on the recommendation of their surgeon, are given video guides, explanations of what to expect, as well as ways to track and monitor their recovery.
Currently live in four centres, MyRecovery claims to be able to reduce 18 hours from the length of a patient's stay in hospital, working from a baseline of 4.5 days.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
