Zebra

Zebra pushes timely insights to front-line healthcare workers worldwide to protect themselves, their patients, and hospitals from dangerous outbreaks.

“When you hear hoofbeats think of horses, not zebras” has been preached to physicians since first stated by Dr. Theodore Woodward in the 1940s. However, the world is now more interconnected than ever before, primarily due to air travel. The modern healthcare worker now faces threats they would never expect to see at home and ultimately needs to detect the “zebras.”  These include “routine” diseases like tuberculosis, malaria, or measles, or emerging diseases like SARS, Ebola, or Zika. During recent epidemics such as SARS in Toronto, MERS in Seoul, and Ebola in Dallas, healthcare teams and patients became infected with these diseases, occasionally leading to deaths. Since no healthcare worker is capable of recalling the full spectrum of clinical presentations for a plethora of infectious diseases, their global geographic ranges, seasonal patterns, incubation periods etc., diagnostic aids are needed to help them be better prepared to confront dangerous global diseases. The negative impacts of epidemics are amplified in developing countries, where weakened public health systems and agencies have fewer resources and are less prepared to deal with these threats.

We propose to develop Zebra, a web-based alert system, to enhance the clinical acumen of healthcare workers on the front lines against global infectious diseases. The overwhelming majority of healthcare workers lack extensive clinical training or experience in managing emerging infectious diseases. Despite this, they are the most likely initial recipients of patients with these diseases, which, if managed imperfectly, could have serious consequences to their patients, themselves, and their staff. This has the potential to trigger broader epidemics with profound health, economic, and social consequences.

Zebra will serve three main functions: (i) deliver timely education to healthcare workers when they most need it (i.e. when risks of a particular disease appearing in their area are greatest) and notifying them when a disease is known or suspected to be circulating locally (e.g. first case of influenza during a given season) using an intelligent system that relates global infectious disease surveillance and global population mobility data to the local environment, (ii) help healthcare workers form a differential diagnosis for patients who have travelled abroad and return with fever or other illness (including appropriate infection control precautions for the healthcare staff), and (iii) provide important global health updates (e.g. report of a new cluster of MERS in Dubai, a new study about female to male transmission risks from Zika virus, etc.).

 Zebra will offer individual healthcare workers unprecedented awareness of global infectious disease activity and how it relates to their local clinics and populations. It will help prevent local outbreaks from becoming epidemics and will help prevent epidemics from spreading globally via air travel. While the world is connected via global air travel, making it easier for infectious disease to spread, our solution will help create a connected healthcare workforce, where spread of education and global health updates helps protect the global population.

Zebra is a new technology that makes use of a platform that gathers and organizes worldwide infectious disease surveillance data; monitors the movements of >4 billion passenger trips on commercial flights worldwide every year; and integrates these data to analyze and identify the most likely pathways for infectious disease spread. Zebra leverages this platform to offer individual healthcare workers unprecedented awareness of global infectious disease activity and how it relates to their local clinical practice. Our extensive database of pathogen attributes and clinical features of 100+ global infectious diseases is leveraged to create a differential diagnosis tool for Zebra.

Zebra is a novel solution available via email, SMS, and web, but is ultimately platform agnostic as an API. Machine learning algorithms and natural language processing are used to extract pathogen information, geographic locations, dates, and case counts from infectious disease media reports to automate disease surveillance. The Zebra platform incorporates this information, along with human travel data, to deliver timely and actionable insights to users.  Zebra uses supervised machine learning techniques in its differential diagnosis tool by dynamically incorporating the location of travel, incubation period, and seasonality to generate a shortlist of diseases specific to a patient's circumstances. 

Over the next 12 months, we plan to finalize the development, conduct testing, and conduct quality assurance of the Zebra platform. We plan to launch Zebra in public beta at the Canadian Medical Association Summit in August 2018. Following the beta launch, we plan to release the solution across Canada, among physicians, other healthcare workers, and throughout hospitals. We then plan to concentrate our efforts releasing our solution among healthcare workers and hospitals in the US. Our goal is to have Zebra used by individuals and hospitals where the solution may be integrated into their healthcare delivery systems.

Our vision is to get Zebra into the hands of frontline healthcare workers worldwide. Following our Canadian and US distribution, we plan to release our solution among healthcare workers and hospitals in Europe, Southeast and East Asia, and Australasia. Being an online solution, we anticipate passive growth in numerous markets, including developing countries, where healthcare and surveillance systems are weaker and where populations are most heavily impacted by epidemics.

The Canadian Trade Commissioner Service is guiding us in product export to foreign markets. An online ad campaign will target clients. We will reach out to hospitals directly to develop partnerships. We are pursuing Continuing Medical Education accreditation for Zebra to help keep physicians abreast of relevant local and global outbreaks. Zebra will be accessed via desktop, laptop, or mobile device. Push notifications will be sent via email and SMS. Zebra’s differential diagnostic tool will be accessible by web or mobile device.

Our solution is pre-commercial; therefore, it has not yet been purchased or tested outside of a closed beta.

Within 12 months, we will be serving approximately 1,000 Canadian physicians and 20,000 healthcare workers. They will have near-real-time awareness of local outbreaks and those connected to them by air travel, and the ability to quickly diagnose patients arriving from regions with active outbreaks. This will protect the population by preventing outbreaks from becoming epidemics, with effects seen soon after platform adoption. As we release our solution in the US, Europe, Southeast and East Asia, and Australasia, people will be similarly affected. Healthcare workers will be able to help protect themselves, their patients, and the general public.

Our company is made up of infectious disease clinicians, software developers, UX/UI designers, data scientists, and epidemiologists. We contain the technical and clinical resources in-house required to develop and deploy the Zebra solution. Our business growth team is made up of business strategists and program managers who are working to move our company into foreign markets. We have begun discussions with Canadian hospitals and the Canadian Medical Association regarding use of Zebra throughout their institutions and among their members, respectively. 

BlueDot is a software as a service (SaaS) company. Our goal is to establish multi-year SaaS agreements wherein healthcare institutions (such as hospitals directly or an eHR) subscribe to Zebra for their employees and are charged an annual subscription fee of approximately $40,000 per year per institution. This enterprise-level subscription will provide hospitals with insights about diseases that might affect their institution, as well as administrative functionality to send out alerts to the appropriate healthcare workers.

We will also offer a per user per month/per year subscription model to individual clinicians, and are still determining the price as part of our pilot.

We are well positioned for long-term sustainability and profitability based on the scale we can achieve in short order. By developing a solution that automatically delivers tailored insights to users, BlueDot can focus on expanding its reach to new hospitals without having to manually perform complex disease analysis. This will enable us to grow quickly and deliver highly valuable insights to users while also enhancing our gross margin.

The $10,000 USD prize would support us in the release of Zebra across Canada and to begin our export activities in the US. Matchmaking with leaders in the healthcare industry would allow us to reach hospital administrators and healthcare workers, important potential clients of Zebra. Organizational mentorship will give us the expert guidance needed to help scale our solution. Impact measurement validation and support from Solve would help us determine the impact of our solution and how best to amplify it. Media visibility, especially in new markets, would be invaluable in making our solution known to potential clients. 

One of the major barriers to success is our ability to scale to multiple languages as well as the cultural and legal implications of market entry. Solve can help us get the Zebra solution into these markets through its network of leaders in the healthcare industry, as well as its understanding of building global solutions