Vibrent Health Leverages AI-Based Technology to Build a Tool Improving COVID Response

New AI tool helps proactively screen, test and identify people at risk for COVID  

FAIRFAX, Va.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Vibrent Health, a health technology startup powering the future of precision health research, has developed artificial-intelligence-enabled technology which can greatly improve public health pandemic preparedness and response. The AI-driven privacy-preserving virtual symptom screening application, BASIS (Broad Assessment and Symptom Identification System), offers a flexible and convenient way to screen and test people who experience symptoms of COVID-19 or other respiratory infections. It also allows users to activate optional contact tracing if they get a positive result.

Widespread screening and testing continue to be key in mitigating the spread of COVID-19. White House Response Coordinator Jeffrey Zients announced on October 6 that as part of the administration’s efforts on health care preparedness issues, the White House would work with industry to ramp up production of at-home tests to meet its goal of expanding the U.S. market for testing to 200 million tests per month. Currently, nationwide testing is close to an all-time high, of nearly 2 million per day at the end of August and exceeding 7.7 million in the first week of October.

“We created a nationwide digital infrastructure to help society respond quickly to the COVID-19 threat,” said Vibrent CEO Praduman “PJ” Jain. “Using AI-enabled software, we have developed a powerful application which brings unique capabilities to the fight against current and future pandemics.”

Vibrent received a $4.2 million contract from NIH to develop the privacy-preserving pandemic management SaaS software. BASIS creates user-friendly screening questionnaires consumers can complete wherever they are, using a mobile device or desktop computer. The tool includes an AI-powered questionnaire builder that adapts as the pandemic evolves and symptoms change.

Because the application can be used on mobile devices, it attracts a larger and more diverse population of users, some of whom might have difficulty coming to an office location to take tests.

To create the application, Vibrent selected respiratory and non-respiratory symptoms that can differentiate COVID from flu cases and used scientifically validated surveys to corroborate these data as a basis for training the AI. It utilizes more than 4 million data points, including symptoms data and demographics from large federal databases and fellow citizens.

The application uses a comprehensive, integrated data-driven process which helps identify, screen and test people proactively. AI-based screening algorithm calculates how high their risk of having COVID-19 is and sends test kits to their homes. The technology may reduce the need for physical COVID-19 tests and therefore can optimize the limited supply of physical COVID-19 tests and strengthen the test supply chain; and because the AI-powered tool tracks results in real-time, the technology can be used to prevent fraudulent testing, addressing concerns related to testing requirements, such as in workplaces.

The tool’s powerful AI abilities were developed in collaboration with George Mason University, working with Professor Farrokh Alemi, Ph.D. Dr. Alemi investigates causal relationships among large amounts of data in electronic health records and has developed several artificial intelligence models to assist delivery of health care.

“This tool can improve efficiency of patient triage and preserve much-needed resources,” Farrokh said. “It can reduce unnecessary in-person visits to health care providers, which will assist health care facilities in managing their pandemic response more effectively.”

“We are seeing that consumers can use the on-screen, self-explanatory tool effectively,” Jain said. “They are able to input their symptoms, use the self-administered home test and get their results quickly. These capabilities can play an important role in the fight against COVID-19 by making it simpler to identify those who are infected.”

To learn more about how Vibrent Health can accelerate your digital health research, visit: www.vibrenthealth.com.

About Vibrent Health

Vibrent Health’s mission is to accelerate health research to optimize human health through precision technology and digital tools that empower participant engagement, research analytics, and research management for researchers, research organizations and research participants. Through its Digital Health Solutions Platform, the company provides a large-scale versatile global platform for health research. The platform provides an infrastructure for data collection from broad sources including genomics, environment, lifestyle, behaviors and electronic health records. Since February 2017 Vibrent Health has served as the Participant Technology Systems Center for the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program, which aims to collect health data from one million or more people to support a wide variety of research studies. To learn more, visit vibrenthealth.com.

Contacts

Vibrent Health

Pearson Brown

+1 310-994-7057

pbrown@vibrenthealth.com