Laura Health

Integrated AI platform that optimizes the use of resources and relieves the burden from the healthcare system.

Hugo Morales M.D., infectious diseases specialist and Chief Medical Officer of Laura

The current pandemic highlights the importance of managing resources efficiently in order to prevent healthcare systems from collapsing. Most countries around the world suffered from the shortage of resources like hospital beds and mechanical ventilators, but in emerging countries, like Brazil, the problem is exacerbated due to a general lack of funding and poor infrastructure. As a consequence, the month of April 2021 was marked by the collapse of healthcare systems in multiple cities, where the waiting line to an ICU bed reached the hundreds, leading to unnecessary deaths.

This situation highlights the flaws of our current healthcare system when responding to a pandemic. The overflow of patients to the ER, many of them unnecessary, exposes front-line workers to deadly pathogens, reducing the capacity of attending patients. Poor digital infrastructure hinders the identification of the most vulnerable population and wastes valuable resources. The restriction of movement deepens the inequality of access to health services by different social-economic populations, affecting the poor much more severely.

Our target audience are the institutions that compose the healthcare system, mainly hospitals, but also city health departments, healthcare providers, etc. We seek to help them manage their resources efficiently, by offering solutions to expand their capacity to attend patients.

Our objective is to deliver value to the entire population by optimizing the healthcare system, through a sustainable solution that can be maintained during "peace time" and speed up the digitization of healthcare, closing the gap on health access inequality.

In a health emergency where the healthcare system is overloaded, having a tireless AI monitoring patients and detecting early signs of clinical deterioration becomes even more important in decreasing the burden from the healthcare system.

We are working together with our target audience to further develop our chatbot and allow it to answer common complaints that might drive people to the ER needlessly. Inside the hospital, we are improving Laura Clinical Intelligence to decrease antibiotic usage through a stewardship program and increase adherence to acute stroke protocols.

By offering health institutions with technological solutions to improve the management of resources, we hope to raise the standard of the care of the entire population. Thus, in emergencies situations, the healthcare system will be better prepared to handle the sudden increase in demand without collapsing.

We seek to establish a Laura Cohort of patients in the molds of the MIMIC database and publish a sample of this cohort, so that research groups can use it as a source of academic knowledge and help the advancement of science.

Healthcare system

Our solution seek to expand health services capacity of offering remote consults, monitor patients from the safety of their homes and identify the vulnerable population that need the most urgent care. Decreasing the burden from front-line workers and lowering mortality rates.

Health professionals

By improving the workflow inside the hospital, we decrease the work load, and consequently the stress suffered by front-line workers. We also seek to offer important data from physician's patients in the palm of their hands, allowing for more informed decisions about a patient's care.

Patients

Patients will have increased access to health services from the safety of their homes and benefit from a better standard of care provided by the improvements in the healthcare system.

First year

In the first year, we are going to plan our expansion to more hospitals in Brazil's public health system. Through our partnership with the Ministry of Science and Technology (MCIT) we are going to choose 15 hospitals from EBSERH, which is a network of 40 public hospitals from every region of Brazil.

By the end of the first year, we hope to be implemented in at least 5 from the 15 hospitals.

Next three years

In the next three years, we hope to be implemented at the 15 chosen hospitals from Brazil's public health system, potentially impacting more than 30 million lives with our solution.

We measure our success by the number of patients that were able to receive medical care from the safety of their homes using our solution. Another metric is the amount saved by health institutions through the use of our AI powered chatbot that handles most of the work without the input of a human.

From our metrics, Laura Digital ER, reached 380 thousand patients, monitored more than 78 thousand exclusively through our chatbot and by our calculations, helped health institutions save a combined 10 million BRL (~1.3 million GBP) .

Our indicators from inside the hospital are the number of patients that received an intervention due to an alert, increase in number of vital signs collected by the nursing team, overall performance of ML models, lower ICU transfer rate and lower mortality rates.

A case study done with Marcio Cunha Hospital, one the best hospitals from Brazil, showed that in a year, Laura Clinical Intelligence helped the hospital save 5.5 million BRL (~700 thousand GBP), reduced mortality rates by 25% and reduced patients length of stay by 10%. This case study won the HIMSS - Elsevier Digital Healthcare Award Brazil and Latin America 2019.

Implementing our solution in the public sector

Brazil is currently living a severe economical and political crisis, public investment for healthcare and education were frozen for the next 20 years. Due to that, finding funding for the implementation of our solution in the public sector has been a challenge.

Integration Process

One of the main challenges of our solution is the process of integration between our infrastructure and the hospital's. It requires extensive work from both IT teams to insure that the data collected is in the correct format. This process might hinder our schedule of implementation in the 15 hospitals.

Infrastructure

Another challenge is scaling our infrastructure to maintain 100% of uptime. Financial and manpower constraints might hinder our scalability.

Through the extensive network from MIT Solve's prestigious institutions we could increase our exposure and seek partnerships to increase the visibility of our solution, attracting more partners interested in funding it.

By receiving additional funding, we could hire more developers to help solve these challenges, finance our solution in public hospitals and achieve our scaling goals for the next three years.

1. Hospital Nossa Senhora das Graças
2. Hospital Marcio Cunha
3. Hospital Erasto Gaertner
4. Hospital Ministro Costa Cavalcanti
5. Hospital Alemão Oswaldo Cruz
6. Hospital Mãe de Deus
7. Hospital São Cristovão
8. Santa Casa de Misericórdia de Porto Alegre
9. Hospital de Clínicas de Passo Fundo
10. Hospital Unimed Grande Florianópolis
11. Prefeitura de Curitiba
12. And more...

We are applying to the challenge to establish partnerships with world renowned institutions from Solve's network, in the hopes of increasing of our visibility and help bring our solution to the world. The possibility of receiving additional funding could help us overcome our main barriers and deliver our solution to more health institutions, positively impacting millions of lives.

Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help establish partnerships outside Brazil and help internationalize our solution.

Imperial College of London to establish a research partnership and fully realize our database's potential to the advancement of science.