FindOurHealth

Our platform (FindOurHealth) empowers trustworthy and fulfilling conversations around healthcare topics, tips and recommendations at scale, when it matters (i.e. during outbreaks). This is based on patent-pending technology that measures group opinions and delivers real-time insight to everyone using a combination of NLP, perspective measurement algorithms, and a unique UX that delivers real-time insight as conversations unfold. When used in civic engagement, our system reveals contextualized opinions of different groups, helping them find common ground, faster consensus and trustworthy recommendations that produce better outcomes. By bursting “filter bubbles” with trust generation, we want to use our platform to transform public discourse on health at the right moments.

Few industries are more prone to misinformation than healthcare, especially in times of uncertainty such as outbreaks and natural disasters. Health misinformation is never harmless, whether intentional or not. That is why it needs to be addressed, especially considering its importance in our economy, politics and society. Misinformation about health is now systemic and has roots in a wide variety of activities. For example, the public's understanding of health is profoundly altered by their personal experience. These experiences vary widely by income, health status, and social determinants of their health. Moreover, there appears to be no real source of trust in the healthcare industry, especially from the public's viewpoint, which receives most of their information from large technology platforms that are likely to spread “online fakery” such as Facebook and WhatsApp. Additionally, media attention and political decisions around healthcare issues, trends and recommendations often lacks objectivity and varies widely among population sectors, which negatively impact the trustworthiness and reach of beneficial information for the individual and for all, which ultimately polarizes and amplifies misinformation. Thus, tools to bring that trust back using network effects and with the right discourse that brings people together in healthcare priorities and actions is needed.

Our conversational platform provides deep analytics accessible in a simple UI to give people real-time mutual insight in conversations and news feeds, to enhance the productivity of their interactions. Our solution includes three patent-pending innovations on both the “front-end” and “back-end” of our platform: 1) We invented a series of UI/UX mechanisms that help people track discussion context and react with deliberate intentionality. For example, all comments are tagged with a topic, our NLP (AI) engine assists people in identifying topics, and when someone “upvotes” a message they identify the topic to which their “upvote” pertains. 2) We developed algorithms to measure contextualized group perspectives, leveraging our unique UI/UX. This enables us at a moment’s notice to identify information that a group believes to be trustworthy on a topic, as an output of our platform. 3) We invented analytical display features that enable every user to easily compare the consensus opinion of different groups on a topic (from step 2), enabling them to explore different perspectives and find common ground with a single click. Taken together, these innovations create a virtuous cycle of trustworthy consensus that strengthens the readiness and resilience of each individual and the entire community.

Anyone who searches and shares healthcare-related information with the intention of benefiting and creating positive impact in their communities could benefit from our solution. Online communication platforms globally struggle to understand and serve the needs of large and diverse communities around health information. Online surveys are widely used but typically contain closed-end questions that yield limited insight. Small face-to-face discussions are more effective at promoting mutual understanding and effective communication of health information, but this process is difficult to scale-up. Furthermore, the lack of a trustworthy digital footprint of most organizations in the view of different user populations prevents the generation of productive, large-scale conversations that are needed in addressing public health issues, especially in moments of emergency and fear (i.e. outbreaks). We are actively interviewing and understanding all relevant stakeholders in the media and personal communication business to develop the most useful and engaging experience for trustworthy consensus health information online. 

Our solution fully matches the intent of Solve's health security and pandemics challenge, with focus on coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) as well as other infectious disease emergencies, as trustworthy information delivery and consensus generation at scale in online conversational platforms has a crucial role to play, both the prevention and mitigation future disease outbreaks. We believe giving scalable access to accurate and actionable healthcare conversations free of misinformation is the most empowering and simple concept in healthcare that is yet to be addressed.

FindOurHealth is building a smart engagement platform to empower healthy and productive conversations at large-scale. Our technology measures group opinions and delivers real-time insight to everyone in the platform using a novel trust-scoring system and NLP in a unique UX. When used in a civic engagement project, our system reveals contextualized opinions, biases and trust between groups, helping people explore different views and nd common ground, enabling faster consensus and better outcomes.

Our core technology is enabled by a set of novel systems, processes, and mechanisms, included in three provisional and one non-provisional patent applications which enables a complete conversational trust-scoring system that makes communications more robust and enables a unique user experience.

Our live app can be accessed here: https://apf.findourview.com/health

Our conversational platform allows for deep analytics to give people real-time mutual insight in conversations and news feeds, to enhance their productivity instead of exploit them. Most civic engagements use small, in-person group discussions to maintain their quality of conversation. They cannot use large-scale online discussion platforms, because the solution we have does not yet broadly exist, until now. When used in civic engagement, our system reveals contextualized opinions, biases and trust between groups, helping people explore different views and find common ground, enabling faster consensus and better outcomes. Thus, our platform is flipping the filter bubble on its head, using NLP and perspective measurement algorithms in a unique UX so that people everywhere can access and feed information that grows into trustworthy consensus that people can feel part of and resonate with. 

We currently serve 100 users. In year 1 (2020) we will provide platform services to 50 health organizations in the US, reaching a projected 250k end-users, and make our rst $1M in revenue, employing 15 employees. By year 5 (2024), we will grow to a global scale, serving over 7,500 organizations and 35M end users, with $150M in revenue and 200 employees. We will transform public discourse, using our technology to enable broader access to collective intelligence throughout society.

In year 1 (2020) we will provide platform services to 50 health organizations in the US, reaching a projected 250k end-users, and make our rst $1M in revenue, employing 15 employees. By year 5 (2024), we will grow to a global scale, serving over 7,500 organizations and 35M end users, with $150M in revenue and 200 employees. We will transform public discourse, using our technology to enable broader access to collective intelligence throughout society.

Economic resources and full time engineering capabilities

Fund raising

Our system is a spinoff from research conducted at MIT

2 full-time staff, 3, part-time staff, 3 interns, 2 advisors

FindOurView's team is extraordinarily diverse, with strong ties to MIT and deep backgrounds in multicultural engagement, technology, and entrepreneurship. CEO George Whiteld has three degrees from MIT and 14 years in innovation and impact-driven entrepreneurship, architecting FindOurView's technology and business development. 

Our second co-founder, Xiaorui (Rita) Ma a co-founder has a deep background in marketing communication and multicultural studies. She has 5 years of experience in Boston-area startups and small businesses, speaks four languages fluently, and has two masters' degrees from Emerson College, Boston and Nagoya University, Japan.

Luis Soenksen is currently leading our healthcare efforts as an experienced serial entrepreneur in the space of medical devices and digital heath.

We are advised by the MIT Venture Mentoring Services and the MIT Innovation Initiative. We are also in frequent communications with Boston-area angel Joe Caruso of Bantam Group for advice and as a potential early investor.

We aim to provide our SaaS to civic the general public for free and sell it to corporate engagement groups (50 in 2020) for analytics, typically with 5k users per organization, charging $2/user/month, and a 2 month campaign per organization. To reach them we are conducting over 120 customer discovery interviews in NSF I-Corps and working with an MIT professor of civic engagement. Costs (mainly labor) are subdivided as engineering, marketing, and general/administrative, accounting for 65%, 13%, and 22% respectively and a burn rate of $185k/month by 2021.

We are going after the global market of customer experience management, which is $6B in size and growing by 23% CAGR. In the US this includes digital communications for 800 community foundations and corporate employee engagement in the Fortune 1000.

We are passionated about solving the problem of misinformation in health, specifically around outbreaks and disaster situations. To us there is no more compelling argument for developing our technology than solving this global problem.

We want to bring brilliant people that can help us execute our vision of a future with open conversations at scale on healthcare issues that people can trust.

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation