Bill Gates backs Ada Health symptom checker

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

• A symptom-checking tool called
  Ada Health is launching a new partnership with the Bill and
  Melinda Gates Foundation.
• On Wednesday, the startup will begin working with the
  Gates Foundation to study how the tool could support healthcare
  workers in rural parts of the world.
• Ada Health is already one of the most popular medical
  apps in over 130 countries.

Getting to the doctor when you’re not feeling well is no easy
task no matter where you live. But in many parts of the
world, there are bigger problems than high costs and long wait
times.

For roughly
half the globe’s population, basic healthcare is a luxury
that’s too expensive to get. So
Ada Health, a tool that lets you type in your symptoms to
learn what’s causing them, is launching a new initiative with the
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to extend the reach of its
services.

The
Ada app is designed to tell you what’s causing your
symptoms with more accurate results than you’d get from a Google
search. Users open the app, enter their age and gender, and type
in a symptom like pain or a cough. Then an AI-powered bot asks
several questions, like what makes the symptom worse, and tells
you the most likely culprit.

Starting today, Ada is working with the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation to study how the platform can be used to support
healthcare workers in rural parts of several countries in East
and Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, South America, and India.

The project is part of Ada’s new Global Health
Initiative, a series of projects focused on improving
access to primary care in underserved populations across the
world. The effort will involve work with local governments, NGOs
and other partners as well. 

“The reason we’re doing this is the same reason why we started
Ada in the first place: it’s about giving people better access to
quality healthcare,” Daniel Nathrath, CEO and co-founder of
Ada Health, told Business Insider. “While it’s a noble goal to
pursue it in the US or Germany, it’s even more important in
countries where so many people don’t have access to a doctor.”

Currently, the app is available in roughly 130 countries
including Germany (where it started), the US, and Canada.
Already, roughly a third of Ada’s customers hail from countries
outside of Germany, according to the company.

To Google or not to Google

The Ada Health team. From left to right: pediatrician
Claire Novorol, Daniel Nathrath, and neuroscientist Martin
Hirsch.
Ada
Health

To Google or not to Google — that’s often the question when it
comes to an ailment like a cough or stomach pain.

But researching your symptoms online can send you down a rabbit
hole that leads you to think you have a life-threatening
condition. A trip to the doctor, n the other hand, can be
time-consuming and expensive.

Nathrath and his co-founder, Claire Novorol, created Ada Health
to give people a third option.

Unlike the results that come from sites like WebMD, Ada’s results
are based on a growing database of hundreds of thousands of
people that match your age and gender. The idea is that by homing
in on a population sample you fit into, Ada can give more
accurate results.

Say you’re a 31-year-old woman experiencing stomach pain, for
example. Once you type in your symptoms and answer Ada’s
questions, it might tell you that most of the other 31-year-old
women in the database who reported your symptoms were diagnosed
with Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Then Ada may advise visiting
a healthcare provider. Or if the likely cause of your symptoms is
not a serious issue, Ada may suggest that you simply rest.

Ada Health

Putting Ada into the hands of healthcare workers

As part of the new partnership with the Gates Foundation, Ada
researchers will look at the data the app gathers in several
rural, low-income parts of the world to better understand
patients’ needs and learn how to improve healthcare delivery to
these regions. 

In the future, Nathrath said he hopes such insights could be used
to do things like help stop a deadly outbreak.

Hila Azadzoy, Ada’s managing director of the Global Health
Initiative, told Business Insider that her team is now working to
equip Ada with more relevant data on tropical diseases like
Chagas and dengue. They’re also analyzing what kinds of physical
diagnostic tests they could give people — along with Ada — to
confirm some of its assessments.

“Most healthcare workers work door-to-door and can track patient
symptoms,” Azadzoy said. “The vision we have is we can put Ada
into their hands and even connect Ada with diagnostics tests
so that — at the home of the patient —they can pull it out and
say, ‘OK this is confirmed,'” she said.

Are symptom checkers the next big thing in primary care?

Since it was founded in Berlin in 2011, Ada has raised $69.3
million with the help of several big-name backers including
William Tunstall-Pedoe, the AI entrepreneur behind Amazon’s
Alexa, and Google’s chief business officer Philipp Schindler. The
company says Ada has already been used by 6 million people in the
US and Europe, where it is one of the highest ranked medical
apps.

Ada is not the only tool that lets users input and track their
symptoms. Another so-called “symptom checker” is primary-care app K Health, which
launched in 2016.

If these services can get the science and AI right, they offer a
long list of potential benefits, including reducing healthcare
costs, saving time for patients and doctors, slashing unnecessary
worry — and even, one day perhaps, helping to prevent an outbreak
like
Ebola.

But more data is needed on the effectiveness of these services.
The last comprehensive assessment of symptom checkers
was published by Harvard
Medical School researchers in 2015, before Ada or K
Health existed. Since then, at least half a dozen other services
have emerged as well.

Until better data becomes available on these apps, they can at
least offer users an educated assessment about what’s causing
a symptom like a sore throat. And in rural areas where
people don’t have access to a healthcare provider, that could be
a huge source of support.

“The first step towards getting the right treatment is
understanding what’s ailing you,” Nathrath said.