Offering detailed assessments that users can share directly with medical professionals, Ada enhances the doctor/patient relationship by eliminating the need to discuss symptoms and get to deeper personalized health solutions faster
Today’s healthcare system is broken. Beyond the billions of people without any access to high-quality healthcare, those of us fortunate enough to visit the doctor regularly, are often short-changed on care, when the majority of the appointment is spent listing symptoms and only a few minutes are left to discuss solutions.
Enter Ada, an AI-driven platform that allows users to input symptoms and determines possible conditions and next steps for treatment. The company has already processed over four million in-app health evaluations globally and is adding 2,000 new US customers per day.
Ada was developed by a team with decades of experience in clinical and theoretical medicine, law, and entrepreneurship. Co-founder Dr. Claire Novorol, Chief Medical Officer, is a former pediatrician with a Ph.D. in neuroscience; Daniel Nathrath, CEO, is a Fulbright Scholar and serial entrepreneur. The company’s Chief Science Officer, Dr. Martin Hirsch, has extensive knowledge and expertise in cognitive neuroscience and semantic knowledge representation.
How Ada is a Leap Forward from Web Search-Driven Health Info
Each year, standard search engines see billions of symptom-related queries. However, these search engines cannot think like doctors; for instance, Google cannot connect the dots between your chronic migraines and your stressful work environment, or your high fever and a recent trip to Brazil.
That’s where Ada comes in. Ada has a user-friendly question and answer interface, operating much like just talking to a family doctor. Using proprietary machine learning technology, simply ask about any of the 5,000 symptoms in Ada’s database and the app provides an accurate, reliable health assessment drawing knowledge from more than 1,500 conditions, from the common cold to rare disease, medical cases, and literature. The more you use it, the more Ada learns about your individual health and the smarter it gets.
The typical doctor’s visit lasts just 13-16 minutes, where the doctor spends precious time discussing medical history and baseline symptoms. Now, doctors will have a long-term picture of the patient’s health in advance, and can immediately jump into the more in-depth questions and concerns, as well as next steps on prevention, treatment, and outcomes, typically rushed at the end of appointments.
The News
Today Ada is making it easier than ever to improve the patient/doctor relationship by launching shareable assessments in-app.
Previously, assessments were viewable only by the patient on their smartphone. Now with the launch of Ada’s shareable assessment tool, users can send a secure health profile, with Ada’s assessment, as well as any other symptoms, allergies, medications, etc., directly to their doctor via email or text message in advance of an appointment.
“Beyond improving the doctor-patient relationship and the typical standard of care, we estimate that the launch of our assessment tool can save doctors more than 2 minutes per appointment, amounting to $5B of doctors’ time, per year, in the U.S. alone,” said Daniel Nathrath, co-founder and CEO of Ada. “We’ve been available in the US for a year and have already completed over 800,000 health assessments — and this is a great step towards making Ada more valuable for users and medical professionals alike.”
With this innovation, the company aims to improve doctor-patient communication and focus on making appointments more efficient, caring, and solution-based.
“Ada is a really useful tool in real-world general practice,” Dr. George Verghese, MBBS, MRCGP, MRCP, GP partner at Waterloo Health Clinic, who has tested Ada’s features within his own clinic.
Since launching in 2016, Ada has experienced 15 – 20 percent month-over-month growth and has quickly become one of the fastest growing health apps worldwide with millions of downloads. The company has also attracted the attention of global investors with $69.3M in funding to date.
To learn more about Ada and download your shareable assessment today, visit www.ada.com.