Let me introduce to you a patient, a boy aged three.
One day, he started grunting at his peers and parents
for no apparent reason.
This was quite unusual for him, because he was rather a shy personality.
At first, his parents thought,
“It’s just normal, it’s a part of his development.”
But soon after,
he also began to start screaming, for hours, as if in pain.
But he wasn’t screaming, he stared vacantly into space.
He became depressive and suicidal.
At the age of five, terrifying thoughts of death plagued him.
Whenever the word ‘death’ came into his head,
he smashed his head into windows and glass
in order to draw out of his thoughts.
He couldn’t go to the bathroom alone anymore,
because of the voices he heard, and the things he saw in his head.
Fear became immense and paralyzing.
Over the course of four years,
100 doctors and a host of misdiagnoses and mistreatment,
the parents tried to make peace with the idea
that their son might never come back.
Misdiagnoses are the blind spot in medicine,
and they have been for decades.
In fact, one in seven diagnoses are misdiagnoses.
Each year, one and a half million lives could be saved by the right diagnosis.
But what cause misdiagnosis? It’s misinformation.
Physicians have to consider more than 20,000 diseases at once,
and this is more that they can handle.
So what can we do about it?
The medical knowledge has already been published,
but it’s really hard to actually retrieve the right data
in a timely manner.
You could go to a specialist,
but they are specialized on a few diseases only.
You could also try to memorize all 20,000 diseases,
with their millions of connections, to symptoms, science, and statistics.
Good luck with that.
There’re already great approaches out there.
Companies have tried to establish so called symptom triggers
since the 1970s.
However, their databases are but far too small
in order to provide any sufficient accuracy,
and furthermore, their results are sorted often in alphabetical order,
so they aren’t helpful for the physician either.
We have developed “Symptoma,” a search engine for diseases.
Physicians enter symptoms, birth-year, and sex,
and they receive a list of matching causes,
sorted by the probability for the specific case,
according to our database.
This is high technology.
We have invested seven years in research and development,
and so far, we have established
the probably biggest disease database in the world, with 20,000 diseases
and millions of connections to symptoms, science, and statistics.
Our proprietary algorithm delivers the results in a smart way
so that the physicians can actually handle and process the information.
Back then, when we started, experts told us
it’s impossible to overcome this kind of technology.
And they referenced
that since the 1970s, companies have tried to do it, and failed;
including companies such as Google or IBM Watson, was still trying it.
We made back then a conscious decision that failure is not an option,
and we have to succeed
because there is too much at stake here, and we did it.
After seven years, leading experts
and even the European Commission acknowledged Symptoma
as one of the best and most promising digital solution in healthcare.
So back to our patient.
By chance and luck alone,
they came across a piece of crucial information
that his condition might be the diagnosis called “PANDAS,”
a rare autoimmune disorder.
The treatment is simple antibiotic, the results: dramatic.
Within days, his fear has vanished,
and he smiled again, for the first time in nearly four years.
Within weeks, all his remaining symptoms just faded away.
He returned out of the blue, after being four years in the dark.
Despite of all the efforts of his parents, his many physicians,
and all the technologies available at the time,
they couldn’t arrive earlier
at this little crucial piece of information that would cure him.
This patient was yet lucky,
because each year,
one and a half million lives could be saved by the right diagnosis.
This is what we are fighting for at Symptoma.
Symptoma empowered physicians to diagnose
even rare diseases that haven’t even been heard of before.
It’s all about providing the crucial piece of information at the right time.
So in future,
we will diagnose even rare diseases within minutes or days, instead of years.
But technologies aren’t going to cut it; at least, not alone.
We need a new mindset in order to overcome misdiagnoses.
You have to acknowledge that physicians are not almighty;
physicians are human, and to err is human.
Unfortunately, in healthcare, errors cost lives.
So we have to provide physicians and patients alike
with all the resources, security, time, and tools
in order to measure and improve diagnostic quality.
So join us and join forces and pool our knowledge
in order to overcome this challenge.
If you want to help to save lives
the lives of one and a half million people each year,
share this story, share this video right now.
If you are a patient, having already experienced a rare disease,
share your story with me, and validate it within our database.
If you are a doctor and an expert in a specific disease
come and contribute your further knowledge
in order to have other doctors and patients [benefit] from it.
Improving diagnostic quality is not only possible now
but it represents a moral, professional, and public imperative.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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