Complio AI OCR

The coronavirus pandemic has seen widespread confusion as companies, schools, and municipalities have struggled to answer the questions that would allow them to reopen safely: Who has exhibited symptoms, and what were they? Who has been tested? Who is at risk? As the world emerges from the pandemic, we anticipate a renewed interest in and demand for better public health management and widespread immunization data tracking. American DataBank's proprietary immunization and compliance data tracking software, Complio, is unique in offering verification services that confirm whether submitted documentation meets an organization's unique compliance criteria. However, to meet the immunization tracking demands of a post-Covid-19 world, we need to scale up, and we need to do so responsibly, without sacrificing accuracy in our verification process. A robust AI OCR application will make immunization tracking solutions available to a wider population, giving leaders the information they need to answer those critical questions quickly.

We anticipate that, as the world moves through and beyond the coronavirus pandemic, organizations that have not typically tracked immunization compliance data will begin doing so in earnest, hoping to better prepare for future public health crises.  Organizations will need to track this information reliably and quickly, in a system versatile enough to accommodate their specific needs.  American DataBank’s proprietary compliance tracking system, Complio, is just such a system, giving organizations and their members the ability to upload their compliance documentation, as well as a verification process that confirms whether documentation meets an organization’s specific criteria.  However, this document verification process has historically been bottlenecked by the need for manual review of each document; where other steps in the compliance process can happen quickly or even instantaneously, manual document review takes 1-3 days.  This bottleneck presents a challenge to the widespread adoption of immunization tracking solutions, as it prevents tracking systems from being truly scalable.

Our solution is to build an AI optical character recognition (OCR) application into our existing immunization and compliance tracking system, Complio.  Currently, Complio users upload documentation into the system -- such as medical records, lab results, and other forms or certificates required by their institutions or organizations -- at which point that documentation is manually reviewed to confirm whether it contains specific data. This can range from simple checks (does the document include the user's name?) to more detailed review (do the results of a lab test fall within the indicated range?). We currently maintain a review turnaround time of 1-3 business days, but this process is susceptible to human error, and is difficult to scale. We propose this AI OCR application within Complio because we believe it will not only allow us to greatly reduce the review turnaround time for documentation, but will also lead to an increase in accuracy in the immunization data that will be used to manage future public health emergencies.

Our immunization and compliance tracking software, Complio, currently serves healthcare facilities and higher education institutions, in particular health education programs and their clinical affiliates.  Our decade of experience working with these partners has given us insight into their compliance demands, from understanding the categories of data they capture to the reporting they need to provide to their auditing agencies. Our goals with the AI OCR application are firstly to improve the services we provide to these organizations, and secondly to make these services more readily accessible to other types of organizations and institutions that will need to track member health data in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.  This solution is designed to provide more accurate compliance data, and faster, so that the leaders of these organizations can make decisions regarding public health with a more solid basis of evidence to justify them. For instance, in an outbreak of a disease for which a vaccination exists, an organization could use this solution to quickly determine which of its members is already vaccinated, and those members newly receiving the vaccine could quickly demonstrate as much.

We agree with Solve's assertion that the world cannot rely on a purely reactive approach to handling pandemics and other healthcare emergencies.  The problem we have identified and our proposed solution are, we believe, part of a larger, proactive approach to managing public health. When the next public health emergency hits, those organizations that track health data more diligently will be better equipped to make critical decisions quickly. Our solution improves upon and expands accessibility for Complio, a tried-and-tested immunization and compliance tracking system that will give organizations of all types an effective tool to manage this information.

Our solution expands upon an industry-leading compliance tracking system, Complio, incorporating AI technology into the document verification process in a way that has not been done in the compliance industry. The document verification process is typically the bottleneck of the compliance process, often taking multiple days, as compared to the relatively quick data entry step or the automatic compliance calculation performed by Complio’s rules engine. By leveraging OCR technology to read both printed and handwritten documents, Complio will make the verification step faster, allowing for rapid compliance verifications on a broader scale. 

The technology at the core of our solution is an optical character recognition (OCR) AI application.  We are looking to build an application that, when presented with a document and associated data, will be able to rapidly determine whether the document matches the associated data. For example, if a user submits an immunization record document, and indicates separately that they received a Tdap shot on 7/1/2015, the OCR application will “read” the document to confirm whether it actually indicates a Tdap shot received on that date, even if the document is scanned or handwritten, or contains data for other types of vaccinations received on other dates.  This will also be a machine learning application, designed to improve its accuracy over time as it processes more examples.

This application will be embedded into our existing proprietary compliance tracking system, Complio.  Complio is a customizable system with a built-in rules engine that calculates compliance instantaneously, applying the institution-specific set of configured rules.  Complio supports several different types and formats of compliance requirements, from e-sign forms to fillable PDFs to quizzes and questionnaires.

Created in 2014, Complio is now the compliance and immunization tracking software used by over 1000 higher education institutions and healthcare facilities nationwide, customized for each and every one of our partners.  Since releasing Complio, we have continued to enhance the system, adding features and improving workflows based on feedback from actual users.  We believe that our client retention rate—98%—is proof that our technology works, providing our partners with reliable compliance data and effective management tools.

In light of the Covid-19 pandemic, humanity is re-learning the devastating nature of pandemics for the first time in 100 years. As long as the human population continues to grow and globalization continues, the possibility of new infectious diseases spreading will certainly increase.  However, even in the face of a crisis like Covid-19, public opinion has not shifted to a more health-conscious attitude; consider the lack of consistent reopening policies across the country, or the public skepticism of measures like wearing masks and maintaining social distancing.

We believe that by harnessing AI technology to improve and speed up immunization verification processes, we will be able to scale this service up and offer it more broadly, beyond just the higher education and healthcare institutions we currently serve.  If immunization compliance becomes the norm across a broader spectrum of industries and businesses, more organizations will be able to make decisions based on reliable health data (rather than guesswork or vague guidelines), and public understanding of issues of public health will increase as the public’s participation in these processes grows.  The result will be a longer-term improvement in public health outcomes and responses in times of crisis.

Complio currently has over 600,000 active users, comprising applicants (e.g., students, candidates, employees, etc.) and administrators.  With an expansion rate of roughly 12% per year, we anticipate having approximately 675,000 users within one year, and approximately 1,050,000 users within five years.  However, these estimates do not take into account new features we expect to roll out in the next five years (including the AI OCR application), which we expect would add new populations of users to the system.

Among our goals in the coming years are various new product and service offerings, some of which are currently in the development pipeline.  In some cases, these new services are additions to the services we offer to existing clients (i.e., for health education institutions and healthcare facilities); in other cases, these would be products to expand into new markets (e.g., HR for healthcare institutions).  We are still a small company, and so another goal of ours is to continue growing, increasing our scope of operations and name recognition within the industry.

On a broader scale, one goal of ours—and a major reason why we are applying for MIT Solve’s support—is to make immunization/compliance tracking a more widely understood and implemented solution.  The pandemic has opened many peoples’ eyes to the necessity of tracking reliable health data and making decisions based on concrete evidence.  We believe that our expertise in compliance tracking, our commitment to technological innovation, and our company philosophy of accountability and integrity make us well-equipped to lead that shift to a healthier, more knowledgeable society.

Our work, and the goals we have laid out for the coming years, depend on certain factors that are sometimes outside of our control.  For instance, while we can devote our resources to the development of new product offerings and features, there is always a possibility of delays due to unforeseen technical issues.  We have not implemented AI OCR technology before, so the novelty of this project also adds a greater level of uncertainty to both the development and rollout.  There is also a risk of public skepticism—some institutions may not be inclined to trust an important task like document verification to an AI application—which could affect our ability to roll out the AI OCR application.

We also face competition from other companies in the same field, some of which already have partnerships with large segments of our target population.  While we believe our existing solutions are more accurate, customizable, and efficient than those offered by our competitors, and while we believe the AI OCR project will further set us apart as innovators in the compliance and immunization tracking industry, contract negotiation in this sphere is slow and at times even pre-determined (such as healthcare consortiums that dictate in their by-laws which vendor their members must use). We have a dedicated business development team that creates and maintains relationships with potential users of our system, but it remains an ever-present challenge for organizations to change vendors.

While we anticipate these barriers to achieving our goals over the coming years, these are in many ways the same barriers we have already faced in the past – the reluctance of potential partners to change vendors; the difficulty and uncertainty of new product rollouts; the limitations we face due to our small size.  We have addressed these challenges in the past through a company philosophy that values internal improvement and a dedication to addressing our customers’ needs.  We have been able to grow as much as we have because we have stayed focused on providing high-quality services and responsive, compassionate support for our partners.  This focus has not changed, even in light of the pandemic, and we believe that this approach will allow us to overcome these barriers.

American DataBank has 85 full-time employees, of which 6 are the main members of the solution team.

American DataBank has over twenty years of experience in the compliance industry, demonstrating along the way our commitment to accuracy, security, and efficiency.  We retain in-house legal counsel in order to stay up-to-date on the ever-shifting landscape of laws governing consumer reports and compliance; our Operations department has implemented a set of best practices that often go above and beyond industry standards, to ensure the highest possible level of accuracy in all reporting and verifications; we maintain biweekly development sprints, updating and enhancing our system dozens of times per year.  However, our dedication to the technical and logistical aspects of our services has not come at the expense of customer support, often cited as a reason clients prefer us to other vendors (or, in some cases, leave their previous vendors to enter into partnerships with us).  We believe we are well-positioned to create the industry’s first AI-powered OCR application for document verification because we have demonstrated our ability to develop effective and creative technological solutions without losing sight of the needs of our clients.

We are not currently partnered with any organizations on the AI OCR project, but we are exploring potential partnerships, in particular with higher education institutions.  We are looking into possible partnerships for the various phases of the project – funding, exploratory research, development partnerships, and ultimately pilot testing.

Our business model is a cloud-based SaaS business model. We use Amazon Web Service as our business infrastructure. We provide compliance tracking and background screening services to organizations, helping them fulfill institutional requirements and obligations (either to their affiliated partners or to auditing agencies). The cost of these services is paid either by the organization or by its members (at the discretion of organization administrators).

We provide these services through an organized division of internal work, from dedicated Operations and Verifications departments to IT and development teams.  We also have dedicated teams of client and applicant assistance representatives, who provide the heartfelt customer support that forms a cornerstone of our company philosophy, and an important intangible element of the services we provide.

Through our years of experience in the compliance tracking industry, we have confirmed the potential market and demand for immunization and compliance tracking services within the healthcare and educational spheres; we are financially stable with our existing services and client base.  As we expand our service offerings with the AI OCR feature, we are confident that this product will bring sustainable revenue for the future, both to our existing clients as well as to the global market.

We believe that the coronavirus pandemic will serve as a galvanizing event for many organizations to begin tracking the health and immunization data of their members more carefully and more consistently than has been typical in the past, so that when the next healthcare crisis hits, shutting down businesses and institutions, they will be well equipped to make decisions about when to safely reopen and who to permit on-site.

We are applying to Solve because we believe our AI OCR solution will provide a substantial benefit to organizations seeking new immunization and compliance tracking protocols in the wake of the pandemic.  We believe Solve presents a unique opportunity not only to get a head-start on a project that we envision will have broad implications in the coming years, but also to partner with a renowned institution that can help us develop a solution that’s intelligent and flexible enough to meet the needs of the moment.

We are looking for support in the development of an AI OCR application within our existing proprietary software, Complio.  We have a dedicated development team, to which we plan to direct funding in order to increase our resources and personnel as we work through the exploration, development, programming, testing, and rollout phases of the AI OCR project.  However, as we are still determining the specific implementation of this technology, we are also open to partnerships to collaborate on feature functionality and back-end design.

We would ideally like to partner with higher education institutions (including MIT).  Currently, our software is used primarily by administrators and students with higher education institutions (and their affiliated healthcare agencies), so we have established relationships with many of these schools already.  We believe partnering with some of these schools on the development and/or implementation of this project, and drawing from these partners’ institutional knowledge and research, would yield a solution with a strong technological foundation, while also building upon these existing relationships.

We believe our AI OCR solution aligns closely with the mission of the AI for Humanity Prize.  Our solution is an application of AI technology to help scale up and improve the accuracy of an existing technology that allows organizations to track immunization and compliance data for their members, employees, students, candidates, and applicants.  The ability to track this data efficiently provides organizations with more reliable information with which to make decisions regarding the health of their members; we seek the Prize's support to help make this service available to a wider population.  For example, in the event of a public health crisis (such as the coronavirus pandemic), organizations with fast and robust immunization compliance tracking systems in place would be able to quickly get answers to the questions they'd need to resolve before reopening: Who has symptoms or has been in contact with others who have symptoms?  If there's a vaccine or antibody test, who has received it?  The organizations that use our tracking system, Complio, have been able to put it to use in the coronavirus pandemic for exactly this purpose.

We believe an AI-driven solution that allows for a broader implementation of immunization tracking will get more people involved in public health management, and thus contribute towards a better collective understanding of public health issues and a more effective collective response when the next crisis hits.