Covidus

Inspiration

Our inspiration came from Giorgos, an acquaintance of mine. Giorgos is 60 years old, parent of two kids and business co-founder. He has hypertension and hyperlipidaemia, but he is taking good care of his heath. He is not obese, he does yearly routine medical exams, takes regularly his two pills and exercises regularly. He has even got his own treadmill machine at home.

After the coronavirus lockdown, he has been using his treadmill every night for 30-45’. One evening though he felt mild flu-like symptoms that did not go away. When he called the COVID-19 hotline they screened him and advised him to stay home taking the standard precautions, which he did.

Unfortunately, his symptoms persisted and on the 12th day he felt dizzy, felt on a furniture and hit his head. His wife surprised and very worried called the emergencies. On hospital admission they stitched his forehead and diagnosed severe COVID-19 pneumonia and serious hypoxia.

Problem Statement

Why did that happen to George? We did our research and found some good reasons.

COVID-19 disease has some unique characteristics

Prefers vulnerable people (elderly or fragile)
One has only mild to moderate symptoms (80% of cases)
Disease develops slowly and silently (incubation period of 2 – 14 days)
Silent hypoxia goes unnoticed although it is a strong indicator of serious illness

Hospitals have a few shortcomings

Huge imbalance between primary care doctors and specialist (1:6).
Only 0,8 primary care doctors per 1000 in Europe
No system in place to proactively get vital markers and symptoms of a suspect case at home
Cannot forecast and plan bed capacity for emergency situations
Overloaded with unnecessary and costly admissions for outpatient health checks

Public Health Services at national and European level desperately need support because

No surveillance system of citizens health
Cannot proactively watch and predict outbreaks from abnormal shifts in people’s health
Can only infer outbreaks already happening from hospitalized and deceased people
Cannot detect and isolate contagious areas, only after a hospitalization takes place
Main solution is a blind and total lockdown in crisis situations

Solution

Targets people older than 45, the most vulnerable (60% of hospitalisations, 80% of critically ill)
Is an integrated system that assists the most vulnerable social group
Enables them to self-check, estimate their risk and take control of their health
Coordinates actions before and after hospital admission
Provides valuable pre-admission and post-admission information to hospitals, healthcare centers and other stakeholders
Opens new frontiers in COVID-19 research, enhancing datasets with out-of-hospital data collection

What we achieved during the Hackathon

Verified strong interest by senior citizens through a quick and informal poll of 18 persons
Most encouraging feedback was their willingness to pay anything between 50 - 100 EUR/ year
Produced an initial predictive model for Hospitalization Risk & Vulnerability Level
Crafted a prototype with a very small dataset for demonstration purposes (to our knowledge, there is currently no dataset with history of pre-admission symptoms )
Created an initial business model, considered constructive feedback and got ideas for the upcoming MVP

Impact during crisis

Covidus can potentially have a huge impact

Reduces unnecessary hospital visits by 25% and all related costs
Forecasts hospitalization needs in certain areas and assists in bed planning and other resources
Assists in identifying high risk residential areas
Warns people when their Vulnerability Level turns orange and informs their personal doctor
Does not require the use of wearables making its adoption potentially massive (only 5% of the European population is using currently a smartwatch)
Provides unprocessed data free of charge to Public Health services for focused containment measures.

Value after the crisis

Covidus will provide continuous value for many years, preventing future virus outbreasts transomring into a crisis

30 - 35% of European population is older than 45.
COVID-19 is threatening to lock-us down also in 2021, if problem remains unsolved
Predictive power of analytics will become better and better as data for out-of-hospital patients grow
Out-of-hospital datasets correlated with vaccinations and testing will grow understanding of infectious diseases significantly

Necessities to continue

Enhance founding team with one or two key partners, a data scientist and/or a product/UX developer
Outsource components of software development, digital marketing, infrastructure and devices to key partners, such as Google, Amazon and Philips
Get pre-seed funding

After this Hackathon

Begin customer discovery:

Produce a working MVP1
Do a pilot with first users (Covidus champions) to validate business model hypotheses
Collect systematically their feedback and create MVP2
Initiate engagement with partners and other stakeholders
Validate business model