NLP in healthcare 1/3: The State of Symptom Checkers (Jeff Cutler, Ada Health)
Symptom checkers have been around for a while. However, research shows that their reliability is still poor and varies substantially among providers, says a systematic review published in Nature in 2022.
Ada is the world's most popular symptom assessment app, with 10 million users and 25 million completed assessments. Every three seconds, someone turns to Ada for personal health guidance. ”We currently cover over 3,600 conditions, and that maps to over 31,000 ICD10 codes here in the United States. So just to put that in perspective, we believe that's at least more than twice as much as other symptom checkers. There are many popular symptom checkers out there that are really just designed to cover the top 20, 30, 50 conditions that people are experiencing,” said Jeff Cutler - Chief Commercial Officer of Ada Health, at HLTH 2022.
In this episode, he talks about:
the development of accuracy and business models of symptom checkers,
how is Ada improving the accuracy of its algorithms,
and their partnership with the likes of Sutter Health to enhance the care patients receive even before entering the doctor’s office,
integration of Ada with EHRs and future plans to integrate with monitoring devices.
This episode is a part of the short series about NLP and health tech. Read more in the newsletter:
The conclusion of the 2022 systematic review “The diagnostic and triage accuracy of digital and online symptom checker tools” published in Nature is that symptom checkers diagnostic and triage accuracy varies substantially and was generally low. Variation exists between different symptom checkers and the conditions being assessed; this raises safety and regulatory concerns.
Digital front door
Ada Health prides itself not only on giving information to patients but on helping clinicians improve medical assessments after the patients went through the symptom-checking process with Ada. “Ultimate diagnosis gets improved, because clinicians also consider certain conditions that they may not be as familiar with,” says Jeff Cutler.
Ada serves as the digital front door for enterprises such as Sutter Health and Kaiser Permanente, where patients access care through an enterprise version of Ada.
EHR Integrated
The encounter with Ada health in the enterprise setting is connected to the existing systems in the institution. “Patients do an assessment, and then instead of just giving them general advice, we map it to the actual triage and care. We then make all of that data available to the clinician in an electronic format in one of two ways. We make it directly available in the electronic health record, so it's available as part of the clinical workflow. When the doctors are examining the patient, they can actually see the data, review it before they see the patient,” said Jeff Cutler.
Ada also pulls data from EHRs, and the company wants to pull in the information from monitoring devices soon, to get to a more accurate diagnosis suggestion.
Tune in for the full episode.