Exclusive: American Kidney Fund, Ubie partner for AI kidney disease detector
The AKF and Ubie will fine-tune the digital health company's AI-enabled symptom checker to help accelerate kidney disease diagnosis.
In an effort to shorten a patient’s time to treatment, the American renal Fund (AKF) and the global healthcare AI platform Ubie will work together to improve Ubie’s AI-enabled symptom checker for renal disease identification.
After clinical research papers are used to train Ubie’s AI, a physician review panel examines the prediction pathways and symptoms linked to a given illness.
As of right now, the AI can identify 1,100 illnesses from the International Classification of Diseases, or ICD 11, published by the World Health Organization.
We use our symptom checker in a special way for therapeutic purposes. Sanjeev Menon, head of partnerships at Ubie, told MobiHealthNews, “We are deployed in 1,700 clinics and hospitals in Japan, and the physician usage of this product goes back to training our AI, which is then used for our patient-facing symptom checker.”
As part of the collaboration, AKF will give Ubie access to 25–30 patients who are aware of the etiology of their kidney disease, which will help Ubie improve its symptom checker for kidney disease diagnosis.
Mike Spigler, VP of patient support and education at AKF, told MobiHealthNews, “These are patients that we know have ‘traditional kidney disease’ (so diabetes or high blood pressure, which are the two main causes) or some rare kidney disease, but they know the cause of it and that’s important because, with Ubie’s algorithm and the way they do it, patients ask questions.”
Menon stated that Ubie will use its symptom checker to collect aggregated data from the patients who have already received a diagnosis.
The business will next examine the answers each patient provides and the sessions they undergo to ascertain which answers correspond with the patient’s diagnosis. Then, in order to improve the accuracy of its algorithm, Ubie will identify any areas where the AI is lacking.
“You want to make sure it’s accurate and that the questions being asked are driving people to the right place, but it’s also the way in which the AI presents the questions and how people respond,” Spigler stated.
Menon stated that Ubie aims to address the fact that users in AI are frequently disregarded.
“What we’re trying to do with our symptom checker is get the patient voice and incorporate the patient voice into it to make sure we understand how users use the platform – phrase things in a way that is most commonly phrased by the user, not a clinician, and, therefore, it will lead to better output,” Menon explained.
“Better output in AI, in our case, means better care guidance and better care decisions made by the patient.”
The digital health startup claims that Ubie would direct patients to the American Kidney Fund for additional information once they have an understanding of their risk for kidney disease, thereby expediting their care path.
“The journey to diagnosis, especially for some of the less common diseases, can take years,” Menon stated. “If we can help people have more informed conversations and find the right doctors off the bat, then we’re going to shorten that time to the correct diagnosis.”
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