It’s pretty cool seeing startups you’ve supported make an impact after years of hard work. DetectED-X, a health-tech startup founded by world-leading researchers Professor Patrick Brennan, Professor Mary Rickard and Dr Moayyad Suleiman, is one of those startups making a big impact during the currently global pandemic.
DetectED-X came through INCUBATE in 2019 with software that helped clinicians better detect cancer through web based training. Their software tool allowed clinicians all over the world to test their detection skills and receive feedback on what they missed and how to improve. These interactive web-based test sets really work —their published results saw an 34% improvement in cancer detection among clinicians who use the tool.
Now they’ve turned their attention to COVD-19 with the same software reconfigured to help frontline healthcare workers, doctors and radiologists, diagnose cases faster and more accurately. CT scans produce images within minutes and are also able to diagnose COVID-19 in the very early stages that escape detection with the nucleic acid tests. The ‘CovED‘ learning module helps doctors better detect COVID-19 on CT scans and uses AI techniques to train on where they’re going wrong to adapt the learning modules as they progress.
To date clinicians from 77 countries have used DectectED-X to train themselves up on detecting COVID-19. Just this week Health Minister Greg Hunt announced $1 million in funding to further boost the initiative and get more doctors on the tool. The announcement also includes a great quote from Professor Brennan, “We’re pretty convinced this will transform people’s abilities to recognise the severity and progression of COVID-19. If you’re a clinician in Cyprus, you will just log onto our website and register for free, and the first thing you see is these COVID-19 cases our experts have judged.”
From a product and investment perspective these types of software startups I find very interesting. Unlike a lot of ‘AI enabled’ health-tech startups out there which aim to completely replace or augment clinicians these startups start with burning problem right here and now – healthcare is still very much a human diagnosis profession and these professionals need to upskill to better improve global health outcomes. We can’t presume hospitals and healthcare systems can afford to switch to typically extremely expensive AI enabled software anytime soon.
To be sure, I’m not suggesting that we shouldn’t be developing AI-based clinicians, thats already happening and the the results are promising, but one of the considerations for any go-to-market strategy is how do you get it out there now and how can you educate the market to help change their processes gradually, not suddenly, as is especially required in healthcare.
For DetectED-X they’re in a great position to further bolster their AI-assistance and develop these aspects as they grow. Switching from training tool to a real-time AI-assisted detection is not a huge leap from a software perspective (regulatory and efficacy perspective there are challenges).
For startups tackling healthcare this time is probably quite different than from a decade ago (try selling software into hospitals and you’re in for a world of pain) and we will see some incredible success stories in the years ahead I suspect.
We often tell startup founders to tackle the big problems in life and healthcare is one huge area full of problems and opportunities.
If you are healthcare worker you can use DetectED-X for free now with this link here. If you want to read up more on Incubate check out this blog post on some of the lessons from DetectED-X cohort and university accelerators broadly.
