MedAi

Around half of the world’s population have little or no access to basic healthcare services. Telemedicine has gained significant traction in recent years improving remote healthcare delivery but its scalability is limited by the availability of trained healthcare professionals and support operators. Patients in developing countries often have to travel multiple times for a single medical consultation often several hours each time. The healthcare-associated travel cause loss of wage and leaves a massive carbon footprint on the environment. This accessibility issue deters people from seeking medical assistance and these unattended issues can turn into medical emergencies. Due to the absence of electronic health record systems during emergencies, routine medical tests are often repeated adding a hefty sum to the bill. Worldwide an estimated 100 million people fall below the poverty line every year due to unexpected out of pocket medical bills and are pushed further away from routine healthcare. 

Artificial Intelligence (AI) have the potential to revolutionize remote healthcare delivery using data-driven insights. However, current AI-powered digital health platforms fall short to become truly global digital health platforms due to their intrinsic data bias. The majority of these platforms offer AI guided symptom checkers that are tuned using white caucasian patient populations and fails to accurately serve other ethnicities. 

MedAi is a comprehensive digital healthcare platform with a mission to leverage mobile connectivity, AI and health analytics and establish data-driven seamless digital connectivity between patients and doctors and assist healthcare professionals to deliver personalized healthcare services in patients’ native language. A patient can simply open the mobile application on their smartphone and using Automated Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Health Knowledge Graph (HKG) MedAi’s symptom checker guides the patient through a series of medical questionnaires like a medical professional to accurately capture their symptoms and seek medical help regardless of their geographic location. To speed up the diagnosis the clinician receives a consultation request aided by MedAi’s data-driven clinical insights such as provisional diagnosis and recommendations based on patients’ health records and health analytics from patients with similar ethnic and geographic backgrounds. For trivial problems, the clinician will have the option to issue an e-prescription or book a virtual or physical consultation. Along with the e-prescription, the platform guides patients with personalized health education content in their native language for better disease management. This makes remote consultation truly data-driven and highly effective. 

MedAi will allow millions of healthcare deprived people across the globe to have speedy access to essential healthcare services remotely using their smartphones in their native languages. Through its data-driven seamless digital connectivity between patients and doctors, MedAi will reduce healthcare-related travel by at least 30% hence reducing overall healthcare cost and carbon footprint. Doctors will be empowered with actionable clinical insights to offer faster personalised diagnoses in the shortest possible time. Tailored bite-size health education delivered in their native language will better equip them to manage their health. Overall our platform will digitally empower patients to take better control over their healthcare and have a better quality of life. 

Both myself and my co-founder were born and brought up in Bangladesh. For education and work, we have travelled extensively across the Indian sub-continent and watched very closely how people struggle to access basic healthcare and families are thrown into poverty because of emergency out of pocket healthcare expenditure. We have a good understanding of the linguistic and cultural diversity of the region and people's attitudes towards healthcare. To develop a deeper understanding of their needs and pain points we are conducting in-depth interviews as well as focus group discussions with patients, doctors and healthcare providers (e.g. rural hospitals). As a part of our pilot in Bangladesh, we have partnered with a local medical college and five rural hospitals to study the interaction pattern between patients and doctors, their attitude towards digital healthcare systems, patient behaviour especially around medical follow-up and regional disease prevalences. We have also partnered with a garments industry consisting of 5,000 workers to test our platform’s ability to serve a large number of patients through a single doctor. 

Collectively, betwee the two co-founders, we have 25 years of experience in the application of computational methods ( Machine Learning, ASR, NLP ) to solve healthcare problems and have published more than 50 peer-reviewed journal articles in world-class journals including nature and science. We both hold PhDs in the field of machine learning and bioinformatics.

One of the primary obstacles we are facing while trying to roll out our digital healthcare platform is reluctance among healthcare professionals to adopt new technologies. Most senior doctors in the Indian sub-continent have thriving private practises and are often reluctant to disrupt the status quo without considerable financial incentive. While younger doctors on the other hand are keener towards exploring new healthcare technologies but due to the disapproval of their senior peers they also conform to the norm and carry on. Low education levels among patients is also another big hurdle in this battle. Despite high smartphone penetration in the region adoption of smarter digital tools to improve quality of life remain poor. We wish to collaborate with other solvers, learn from their struggles in similar spaces, modify our technology if necessary for easier customer onboarding and devise a better market penetration strategy. Being part of solve will also give our platform global recognition and better credibility in markets that are otherwise less receptive to new technological advancements.

MedAi is the first of its kind AI-powered mobile healthcare platform capable of generating analytical insights from local disease prevalence to initiate data-driven engagement between patients and doctors, regardless of their language or geographic location, to deliver essential healthcare services at scale. 

Its AI guided symptom checker is comprised of an Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) engine, a Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine and a health knowledge graph module to guide patients through an intricate network of medical questioners in their native language to accurately capture their current condition. It offers actionable clinical insights to clinicians by combining patients’ current symptoms, past medical conditions, and analytical insights from other patients for faster diagnosis.  

The platform will also be the first of its kind to deliver personalized health education such as lifestyle and dietary guidance to patients based on their education levels to ensure the most effective health education dissemination.

No other digital health platform offers such a diverse and complementary set of functionalities to facilitate a smooth end to end communication between a patient and the healthcare provider.

Through our platform, we aim to better connect patients with healthcare service providers. AI guided remote consultation will reduce the need for physical travel for medical consultations by up to 30%. 

Within the first 12 months, we aim to serve 200,000 Bengali speakers on our platform, facilitate 200,000 medical consultations via 200 medical doctors. 

Refine our Bengali prototype to facilitate various Bengali dialects and improve our disease prediction accuracy above 80% for the 10 most prevalent diseases in Bangladesh. 

Develop quality health education content suitable for people with varying education levels and deliver this content to patients who have used the platform. 

By end of 2024, we aim to serve 1 million Bengali speakers on our platform through 1,000 doctors and open our platform to Arabic, Hindi and Urdu speakers. By end of 2026, our goal is to connect 10 million patients to 50,000 doctors through 1,000 hospitals across four ethnolinguistic groups and assist these patients with tailored health education content in their native language. 

We are engaging with doctors and patients through private and public hospitals to whom we offer cloudless hospital management solutions to better manage their operations and achieve greater patient satisfaction levels.

We will measure our impact through the number of AI guided remote medical consultations we facilitate and increase in doctors' capacity to attend to patients.  In collaboration with our academic research partners, we will measure several short term impacts such as increased interaction with health professionals, time and money saved through remote consultation as well as long term compound metrics such as health awareness, gradual increase in female users interacting with healthcare professionals, an overall reduction in carbon footprint. 

Healthcare is a basic human right yet billions across the globe does not have access to it and out of pocket healthcare cost pushes 100 million people to poverty each year. Developing countries like Bangladesh have little or no digital healthcare infrastructure and this is the biggest challenge in rolling out any streamlined digital health service that offers faster access to healthcare for millions. There are recent initiatives from health authorities in many developing countries to digitize the healthcare sector but traditional health infrastructure development might take several decades. Many of these countries have well established mobile networks and strong smartphone penetration and technology can be leveraged to deliver remote healthcare services at scale. There are several examples of financial organizations successfully leveraging these networks to deliver their product and services. We aim to adopt a similar strategy and use the established mobile networks to roll out our digital healthcare platform and encourage regular data-driven interactions between patients and healthcare providers for faster healthcare delivery, increase healthcare awareness and overall quality of life.

Through better access to healthcare and tailored health education, we aim to reduce healthcare travel-associated time, cost and pollution. Through regular interaction with health professionals, we aim to significantly reduce emergency out of pocket health expenditure and the poverty associated with it. 

Despite the presence of many many published studies indicating the positive correlation between the quality of female health and the overall economic growth of a country, health policymakers across the globe have repeatedly failed to recognise its importance and take initiatives to facilitate this [1,2]. Social stigma, religious and cultural barriers prevent women from seeking the right medical help at the right time. The flexibility of requesting remote consultation will encourage rural female patients to engage more with female doctors who are often short in supply in rural locations. This will increase the chances of many life-altering conditions being diagnosed much earlier, taking proper treatment and leading a healthier life. 

1. https://www.bmj.com/content/36... 

2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

MedAi health platform is comprised of several independent AI-driven components to facilitate remote medical consultation. A patient can simply open MedAi mobile application on their smartphones and describes their medical symptoms in their own language. Our symptom checker combines Automated Speech Recognition (ASR), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Health Knowledge Graph (HKG) to guide the patients through a series of medical questionnaires like a medical professional to accurately capture their symptoms and send consultation requests to appropriate clinicians. To speed up the diagnosis the clinician receives a consultation request aided by MedAi’s data-driven actionable clinical insights such as provisional diagnosis and recommendations based on patients’ health records and health analytics from patients with similar ethnic and geographic backgrounds. For trivial problems, the clinician will have the option to issue an e-prescription or book a virtual or physical consultation. We are also developing bite-size audio-visual health education content to better educate patients.  Along with the e-prescription, the platform guides patients with personalized health education content in their native language for better disease management. This makes remote consultation truly data-driven and highly effective.

Both I and my co-founder are from Bangladesh. I am a female entrepreneur. Our clinical advisory board is comprised of three distinguished Bangladeshi female clinicians with a diverse range of expertise in public health, general medicine and infectious disease. Our technical development team comes from a wide range of backgrounds and is spread across three different continents. We encourage female IT professionals to apply for our job openings. Through our platform, we aim to fight the ongoing epidemic of AI bias and develop a fairer healthcare delivery system accessible by all. 

MedAi has adopted a sustainable multi-sided platform business model, where the basic services will remain free to encourage customer onboarding while customers will be charged through subscription fees for premium content such as tailored diet and lifestyle guidance, online patient club access. The primary source of revenue will be its B2B model.

 
The platform will be offered to hospitals as a serverless software as service (SAS) for remote patient onboarding enabling them to expand services beyond their typical catchment area and offer data-driven fast, accurate diagnoses for better patient satisfaction. The primary revenue will be generated from analytics services. Health analytics insights such as regional as well as seasonal disease trends, disease trends among various demographics, real-time disease outbreak warnings will allow health policymakers and healthcare service providers to make data-driven impactful investment decisions and effective service promotion and dissemination.

The global digital healthcare market is expected to exceed £295 billion by 2026 growing at a 14% CAGR. Arabic, Bengali, Hindi and Urdu speakers collectively represent 20% of the total global population and an exceptional level of growth in the digital health sector has been observed in the Middle East North Africa (MENA) and the Indian sub-continent market which is estimated to reach £12 billion. However, there has been very limited development in the sector to serve these growing demands.


Since our inception in mid-2021 MedAi has already partnered with five local hospitals in Bangladesh and aim to connect 20 hospitals and 100,000 patients through our platform by end of 2022. We have already made the first sales of our serverless hospital management solution. Through the appointment referral commission and hospital SAS solution, we aim to generate $50,000 during the first year, $177,000 in year 2, $3 million in year 3, $16 million in year 4 and $46 million in year 5. Our yearly expenditure would be $300K for the first two years and $1.7 million, $3.8 million and $5.4 million in years three, four and five respectively. 

We have already made the first sales of our serverless hospital management solution to a rural hospital in Bangladesh. As a founding client, the price of the solution was heavily subsidised at $1,300. Through the appointment referral commission and hospital SAS solution, we aim to generate $50,000 during the first year.