Symptoma, Better Diagnosis for Patients with Rare and Complex Diseases

Project Information

Symptoma

Grant agreement ID: 830017

DOI

10.3030/830017

Project closed

EC signature date 22 October 2018

Start date 1 September 2018

End date 28 February 2021

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Innovation In SMEs

Total cost

€ 2 282 000,00

EU contribution

€ 1 597 400,00

Coordinated by

SYMPTOMA GMBH
Austria

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - Symptoma (Symptoma, Better Diagnosis for Patients with Rare and Complex Diseases)

Reporting period: 2019-09-01 to 2021-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

OUR MISSION: Every patient deserves the right diagnosis and treatment.

SOCIETAL PROBLEM: To err is human. But in medicine, errors cost lives. "The delivery of health care has proceeded for decades with a blind spot: Diagnostic errors - inaccurate or delayed diagnoses - persist throughout all settings of care and continue to harm an unacceptable number of patients." - Institute of Medicine. Studies have shown a devastating rate of misdiagnoses ranging from 10 to 40%. Diagnostic errors cause 10% of patient deaths. Each year, 1.5 million lives could be saved globally by delivering the right diagnosis. +20k diseases cognitively overwhelm doctors. Only 3% of doctors are satisfied with existing research tools. Misdiagnoses account for €446 billion in wasted costs in the EU and $750 billion in the US. Solving misdiagnosis could free up 30% of total healthcare budgets globally. Patients with rare diseases suffer most. 22 of 30 million patients with rare diseases in the EU don’t have their diagnosis yet, and 8 million had to wait 10 years in average. This leaves doctors and patients with a high unmet need.

SOLUTION: Symptoma.com is a digital health assistant. Users enter symptoms and receive a list of matching causes – sorted by probability.

COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE: Symptoma’s diagnostic accuracy has outdone all competitors’ raising the bar for this field as the first and only viable solution (as demonstrated in first internal and external studies).

OUR GOAL is to improve diagnostic quality while reducing cost and time spent. We will attain this goal by pushing Symptoma to the next level by (deep) learning from search behavior, asking questions (cognitive intelligence), and overcoming language barriers. This project is the first step towards a new paradigm of diagnostic decision-making. We will fully capitalize on the business opportunity counteracting misdiagnoses for companies dealing with rare diseases.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Symptoma has invested 15 years in research and development and attained the by far highest diagnostic accuracy rate. During this project we have (1) further increased the accuracy, (2) developed our chatbot to assist patients, (3) localised Symptoma to 36 languages, (4) validated our results scientifically and clinically, and (5) further commercialised it operating at a profit.

ad (1) and (4) The interim results improving our diagnostic accuracy speak for themselves:

Our first publication made it on the cover of a leading peer-reviewed medical journal by Springer in Germany in May 2019. It was based on an audit study design developed and published by scientists from the Harvard Medical University in 2015. We compared the accuracy of 24 different solutions and could demonstrate Symptoma’s superior performance (Nateqi, J., Lin, S., Krobath, H. et al. HNO (2019) 67: 334. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00106-019-0666-y).

Concurrently, the German society for internal medicine designated Symptoma with the Lateral Thinker award (also in May 2019) for its vast coverage of diseases and diagnostic accuracy (Querdenker-Preis. DMW - Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift 2019; 144(15): 1085 - 1085. doi:10.1055/a-0954-8989).

ad (2) Our chatbot had its debut in the national TV reaching about 1 million viewers in Austria. The results achieved throughout this project are stunning.

Try it out for yourself at www.symptoma.com

Simply state your symptoms, and answer questions to find possible diagnoses.

Example #1: “fever”
Example #2: “I have headache”
Example #3: “fever, headache, cough”
Example #4: “I have to frequently urinate.”
Example #5: “Undercooked eggs”
Example #6 (fun): “Donald Trump”

ad (3) Symptoma is already available in 36 different languages. We clearly exceeded our expectations and goals.

ad (5) We are providing millions of users with our diagnostic results, thus establishing Symptoma as the world’s most used symptom checkers. We are overwhelmed by the number of customers worldwide approaching us. New partnerships, e.g. with leading medical publishers such as Thieme, are helping in massively increasing our reach and revenues.

In the last 12 project months alone we achieved the following:

01/2020: Symptoma.com also worked for COVID-19 as our technology learned from the emerging literature
03/2020: 96.32% accuracy for COVID-19 risk classification in symptomatic patients demonstrated (Pre-print publication; Subsequent Nature publication)
03/2020: European Commission writes a letter to Symptoma asking for its support to fight the devastating impacts of the pandemic
04/2020: A comparison study with 12 COVID-19 symptom checkers demonstrates the highest accuracy rates of Symptoma (Preprint; peer-reviewed JMIR publication)
04/2020: First hospitals integrate Symptoma to check patients and visitors for COVID-19
05/2020: CE Marking
05/2020: First health insurer utilizes Symptoma for COVID-19
05/2020: Austrian government contracts Symptoma to fight against COVID-19
06/2020: The City of Vienna contracts Symptoma to help kindergartens and other crucial organisations
07/2020: Reviewed and awarded the IÖB award by Austria’s innovative public procurement agency
07/2020: Symptoma listed officially as one of four COVID-19 assessment types (next to PCR, antigen, and antibody tests) by Austria’s Procurement Agency
10/2020: The City of Vienna introduces Symptoma as COVID-19 assessment for their citizens in parallel to their call centers – leading to PCR tests
10/2020: 1.5 million interactions with Symptoma’s chatbot for Vienna within 24h
11/2020: Founder Jama Nateqi is awarded as Austrian of the Year 2020 for his research at Symptoma which now is one of the key solution against COVID-19
11/2020: Symptoma demonstrates that the Real-World Data from its millions of users can predict COVID-19 trends in 23 countries - 5 days in advance (Preprint, submitted for peer-review)
12/2020: Austrian government presents Symptoma as the best digital COVID-19 solution from Austria to the government officials of 40 UN countries.
12/2020: Minister of Economics (Republic of Austria) awards Symptoma as best digital Innovation
02/2021: Featured several times by the European Parliament and the European Commission as a success story
03/2021: Clinical validation with thousands of subsequent PCR tests published

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Patients literally suffer and die from misdiagnosis. They deserve, and need more effective solutions, where all available consultations and technologies have failed them.

We have demonstrated and published our technological breakthrough regarding our accuracy and our chatbots’ capabilities.

The potential impact is immense. For the first time, the diagnostic decision-making could be based on objective vs. subjective reasoning thus leading the way for an automated approach providing access to healthcare at scale.

Symptoma is on track as we are already reaching millions of patients providing award-winning results to improve their diagnostic quality.

Symptoma.com