Vetted Cloud Solutions

Due to time, quantity and geographical constraints, healthcare workers may not be able to quickly attend to every patient and diagnose what is wrong with them. Conversational AI agents like chatbots can really help make things better by handling the usual communications from these healthcare professionals while being able to predict with high accuracy the problem a patient has to route them to the appropriate channel and also free the workers time to focus on more critical aspects of their work.

It can also handle the problem of misinformation.

The solution we propose is a conversational AI agent for healthcare institutions which can assist doctors and nurses with diagnosis and also address misinformation for patients. This AI agent will be a chatbot which can be interacted with via voice or text and will be made available on the internet and offline as well via SMS or USSD.

We are specifically working on the misinformation challenge. While our solution can also be applied to other areas of healthcare, we are focusing on the misinformation problem since this has proven to be one of the most dangerous issues in the healthcare industry today.

Misinformation can be harmful to people’s physical and mental health; increase stigmatization; threaten precious health gains; and lead to poor observance of public health measures, thus reducing their effectiveness and endangering countries’ ability to stop the pandemic. It can even lead to loss of lives!

Factors contributing to this include lack of access to healthcare professionals due to cost and time factors, so people rely on hearsay to get critical healthcare information. These factors relate to our solution of using conversational AI to make this information available to disadvantaged people at little to no cost.

A study published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene also estimates that about 5,800 people were admitted to hospital as a result of false information on social media.

At least 800 people have died as a result of misinformation about the coronavirus in the first three months of 2020, the BBC reported.

In simplest terms, our solution will interact with patients in the same way that healthcare workers would. It would be able to provide correct information to the patient and clear any fake news or doubts they may have. 

This leverages on Natural Language processing technology which gives our solution the ability to understand, analyze, manipulate, and potentially generate human language to the user.

It will be built leveraging on Cloud Computing platforms and then easily integrated via the use of APIs to platforms where users can easily connect with them. 

Data for training the Conversational AI agent will be gotten from trusted health information websites like the WHO, Nigeria Center for Disease Control(NCDC) and from top healthcare professionals in accredited healthcare institutions.

Our solutions aims to serve millions of patients in Nigeria who have to go through a lot of stress waiting and queuing to see a doctor for diagnosis and clarification of a few questions. We also want to have a publicly available bot online and offline via text to readily answer and verify the authenticity of healthcare related information distributed online.

Most of these people are underserved because some of them do not have the means to even see a doctor physically for examination while some have to even pay high amount of money just for basic diagnosis.

What are you doing to understand their needs, and how are you engaging them as you develop the solution? How will the solution address their needs?

We understand their needs through discussing with underserved people in local communities to better understand what they commonly believe as facts regarding healthcare information and how they get these beliefs. We also interact with people in other regions asides from our own immediate local community to understand what are the prevailing beliefs in those regions and how they are spread.

Our solution will address the identified needs by connecting people facing the misinformation problem to the right sources of information. This will be achieved by providing them easy access to a healthcare chatbot that they can trust.

Our solution aligns with the Health Security and Pandemics challenge and we are combating the spread of misinformation and inspire people to protect themselves and their communities. 

Our conversational AI solution in form of a chatbot would provide trustworthy answers  to disadvantaged patients who ordinarily would have to worry about the time taken to physically see a healthcare professional for advice and the cost of doing so.  

Nigeria is home to about 201 million people and giving these people access to quality healthcare information in real time will go a long way to save a lot of lives.

We have a prototype of our solution created and hosted on Amazon Cloud and anyone on the internet can access and interact with it through voice or chat via the link: . We have also integrated into a test Facebook page where it has responded to hundreds of queries from different Facebook users.