Submitted by you:

When someone you love is sick, you want them to have the best possible caregiver… You. Healthcast empowers parents to give best practice care amid the stress of everyday life.

As parents ourselves, we understand the stress and worry when a child or loved one is sick. We also know how difficult it is to make sense of the scattered, contradictory and confusing information you get online or from others, information which is all too generic and not aware of your personal context. Healthcast is like your GPS for navigating colds and flu. We give you the information you need, structured so you can use it, and relevant to your situation.

Care starts with prevention, which we enable by monitoring community health and alerting our clients when a threat begins to emerge. If illness does occur, we provide tools and structure which ease the delivery of optimal care and provide intuitive understanding of the patient’s condition (including the appropriate level of clinical concern), and path to recovery. The framework simplifies coordination between caregivers, reducing the burden of miscommunication and worry, as well as the risk of improper medication.

Our main innovation is combining home care and symptom management with epidemic surveillance. Your doctor currently does this basing her diagnosis in part on what she suspects is currently active in your area. The Healthcare system is powered by a medical knowledge graph and a epidemic forecasting engine, both representing the latest scientific research. Epidemic forecasting is an emerging science, which combines multiple data streams to provide insight into current and emerging disease trends.

We initially target colds and flu, which are the most common diseases of humans (500 million colds a year in the US). By spring we will also cover respiratory allergens and by summer emergent threats such as Zika and Dengue.

Our vision is to provide every family on earth the medical competence to handle their health care needs with near-expert skill, thanks to the guidance our system provides. Just as a GPS allows you to navigate an unfamiliar neighbourhood, Healthcast gives you the information you need, structured so you can use it, and with awareness of your context – therefore democratising medical competence.

Dr. Lawyer has over 15 years experience researching medical applications of machine intelligence. He spent seven years as a post-doc at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, where he made fundamental contributions to HIV subtyping and network epidemiology.