Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - Symptoma (Symptoma, Better Diagnosis for Patients with Rare and Complex Diseases)

Teaser

\"OUR MISSION: Every patient deserves the right diagnosis and treatment.SOCIETAL PROBLEM: To err is human. But in medicine, errors cost lives. \"\"The delivery of health care has proceeded for decades with a blind spot: Diagnostic errors - inaccurate or delayed diagnoses ...

Summary

\"OUR MISSION: Every patient deserves the right diagnosis and treatment.

SOCIETAL PROBLEM: To err is human. But in medicine, errors cost lives. \"\"The delivery of health care has proceeded for decades with a blind spot: Diagnostic errors - inaccurate or delayed diagnoses - persist throughout all settings of care and continue to harm an unacceptable number of patients.\"\" - Institute of Medicine. Studies have shown a devastating rate of misdiagnoses ranging from 10 to 40%. Diagnostic errors cause 10% of patient deaths. Each year, 1.5 million lives could be saved globally by delivering the right diagnosis. +20k diseases cognitively overwhelm doctors. Only 3% of doctors are satisfied with existing research tools. Misdiagnoses account for €446 billion in wasted costs in the EU and $750 billion in the US. Solving misdiagnosis could free up 30% of total healthcare budgets globally. Patients with rare diseases suffer most. 22 of 30 million patients with rare diseases in the EU don’t have their diagnosis yet, and 8 million had to wait 10 years in average. This leaves doctors and patients with a high unmet need.

SOLUTION: Symptoma.com is a free search engine for diseases. Users enter symptoms and receive a list of matching causes – sorted by probability.

COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE: Symptoma’s diagnostic accuracy has outdone all competitors’ raising the bar for this field as first and only viable solution (as demonstrated in first internal and external studies).

OUR GOAL is to improve diagnostic quality while reducing cost and time spent. We will attain this goal by pushing Symptoma to the next level by (deep) learning from search behaviour, asking questions (cognitive intelligence), and overcoming language barriers. This project is the first step towards a new paradigm of diagnostic decision-making. We will fully capitalize on the business opportunity counteracting misdiagnoses for companies dealing with rare diseases.\"

Work performed

\"Symptoma has invested 13 years in research and development and attained the by far highest diagnostic accuracy rate. During this project we are (1) further increasing the accuracy, (2) developing our chatbot to assist patients, (3) localising Symptoma to further languages, (4) validating our results, and (5) commercialising it.

ad (1) and (4) The interim results improving our diagnostic accuracy speak for themselves:

Our first publication made it on the cover of a leading peer-reviewed medical journal by Springer in Germany in May 2019. It was based on an audit study design developed and published by scientists from the Harvard Medical University in 2015. We compared the accuracy of 24 different solutions and could demonstrate Symptoma’s superior performance (Nateqi, J., Lin, S., Krobath, H. et al. HNO (2019) 67: 334. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00106-019-0666-y). Further studies and publications are on their way.

Independently, one of the biggest health companies contracted a third party to research 107 symptom checkers and thoroughly test their performance. They concluded Symptoma to be the best by far.

Concurrently, the German society for internal medicine designated Symptoma with the Lateral Thinker award (also in May 2019) for its vast coverage of diseases and diagnostic accuracy (Querdenker-Preis. DMW - Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift 2019; 144(15): 1085 - 1085. doi:10.1055/a-0954-8989).

ad (2) Our chatbot had its debut in the national TV reaching about 1 million viewers in Austria. The results achieved throughout this project are stunning.

Try it out for yourself at www.symptoma.com

Simply state your symptoms, and answer questions to find possible diagnoses.

Example #1: “fever”
Example #2: “I have headache”
Example #3: “fever, headache, cough”
Example #4: “I have to frequently urinate.”
Example #5: “Undercooked eggs”
Example #6 (fun): “Elon Musk”

ad (3) Symptoma is already available in 19 different languages. We clearly exceeded our expectations and goals.

ad (5) We are providing millions of users with our diagnostic results, thus establishing Symptoma as one of the world’s most used symptom checkers. We are overwhelmed by the number of customers worldwide approaching us. New partnerships, e.g. with leading medical publishers, are helping in massively increasing our reach and revenues.\"

Final results

Patients literally suffer and die from misdiagnosis. They deserve, and need more effective solutions, where all available consultations and technologies have failed them.

We have demonstrated and published our technological breakthrough regarding our accuracy and our chatbots’ capabilities.

The potential impact is immense. For the first time, the diagnostic decision-making could be based on objective vs. subjective reasoning thus leading the way for an automated approach providing access to healthcare at scale.

Symptoma is on track as we are already reaching millions of patients providing award-winning results to improve their diagnostic quality.

Website & more info

More info: https://www.symptoma.com.