Ada 2020 | Visual Reasoning Support for Healthcare Professionals

Project Information

Ada

Grant agreement ID: 674459

DOI

10.3030/674459

Project closed

EC signature date 3 August 2015

Start date 1 July 2015

End date 30 June 2017

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Leadership in enabling and industrial technologies - Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)

Total cost

€ 3 440 450,00

EU contribution

€ 2 408 313,25

Coordinated by

ADA HEALTH GMBH
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - Ada (Ada 2020 | Visual Reasoning Support for Healthcare Professionals)

Reporting period: 2016-07-01 to 2017-06-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

400 million people around the world don’t have access to basic healthcare, and even in more developed health care systems, increased resource strain along with the growing complexity of medicine can often lead to incomplete information gathering, misdiagnosis and little consultation time left to spend with patients.
In the US alone, over 12M patients are misdiagnosed each year, with half of those errors leading to serious harm. And in the EU, 23% of citizens claim to have been directly affected by a medical error, with 18% experiencing a serious medical error in a hospital and 11% being prescribed the wrong medication.
Additionally, each year healthcare systems around the world lose billions of dollars due to misdiagnosis and unnecessary procedures. In the field of vertigo diseases, misdiagnoses and wrong treatments cost approximately 1B EUR per year in Germany, and in the US, a recent report by the Institute of Medicine disclosed that the U.S. health system wastes more than $750 billion a year -- or 30 percent of medical expenses -- in unnecessary, inefficient services.
To address these problems, Ada has developed a bespoke probabilistic reasoning engine that supports diagnosis decision making for even the most complex cases in a robust and efficient way, and facilitates a more comprehensive digital record of important health information and history – medication, allergies and more – for users to share with their doctors or other healthcare professionals.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Ada has spent years of fundamental research and development in new reasoning techniques, culminating in an intelligent, visual reasoning tool that sits at the interface between patients and medical professionals, and benefits both. It is supported by a comprehensive medical knowledge base, curated by Ada’s team of medical experts over six years, and today covers hundreds of thousands of real medical cases, conditions, symptoms and findings. Ada’s reasoning technology reviews multiple pieces of data to arrive at the most probable health conditions, and because it incorporates a process of multiple feedback loops and continuous learning, it continues to grow more intelligent with every interaction.
Ada’s 2020 Research team has also successfully helped integrate new data sources and pathophysiological information, including sensors, Apple Healthkit, transient manifestations of diseases, rare disease information and 23andMe into Ada’s reasoning engine. These enhancements contribute to improving the accuracy and personalisation of Ada’s health assessment, and have contributed important insights for the team’s research collaborations with the Hannover Medical School (MHH) Center for Rare Diseases and the HighMed Consortium.
In 2016, Ada translated its existing technology and medical content into a patient-facing, conversational chat bot, available to everyone in the world, and launched additional telemedicine services enabling patients to receive medical advice from doctors. There are many opportunities in the healthcare industry for Ada to grow. Since Ada launched its full end-to-end platform of services, the team has received interest from a number of governments, health providers and other industry stakeholders, where there is a lot of potential for Ada to add value.
The Ada2020 team has been actively communicating the project and its results through press interviews and digital channels- a website that carefully explains the project’s research and technology, a blog highlighting Ada team members, product updates and issues related to Ada’s global impact, and active social media channels. The Ada2020 Research team continues to work closely with stakeholders across Europe’s academic and digital health ecosystem, sharing results and new findings in publications and at health and medical conferences, among other channels.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

According to the WHO, strategies to reduce the rate of adverse events (misdiagnosis and infrastructural inefficiencies) in the European Union, would lead to the prevention of more than 750,000 harm-inflicting medical errors per year, leading in turn to over 3.2 million fewer days of hospitalization, 260, 000 fewer incidents of permanent disability, and 95, 000 fewer deaths per year. A fundamental way to close this gap is to improve access of credible medical information and provide earlier, more comprehensive clinical decision making support.
Along these lines, Ada is transforming the patient doctor-relationship by making it easier for patients to get relevant and personalised health information and advice, while arming medical professionals with actionable patient insights and a sophisticated, real-time decision-support system. Ada is improving the lives of millions of people around the world, with a new health assessment generated on Ada every 7 seconds, and medical specialists identifying cases where Ada’s decision support technology would’ve saved patients years of tests and missed diagnoses.
Mobile technology, combined with ‘intelligent’ reasoning technology, can radically improve global healthcare access, and be transformative for clinical decision making and diagnostic analysis. Given the huge volumes of data in the healthcare sector, there is huge potential for technologies like Ada to help to organise and analyse it, providing health professionals with assistance in making informed decisions, designing treatment plans and managing medication to name a few. On a community health level, the speed and volume at which AI can help process hundreds of thousands of conditions and diseases will also enable medical scientists to identify patterns of disease, identify and track global health issues and trends, and understand and detect conditions on a whole new level.
Each year tens of thousands of deaths could be averted through better care, with innovative health assessment and decision support technologies like Ada helping to reduce the personal suffering of the patients, while generating tremendous cost savings simultaneously.

Ada2020 technology infographics

Ada2020 diagnostic decision support client