Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Inder Singh, CEO of Kinsa Health (Part 2)

Inder Singh: People like our product because it makes it easier to take a sick child’s temperature. We’ve gamified the temperature-taking process. You can record your symptoms and track them for yourself or for your doctor. You can show the doctor the full history. We provide them coaching in the app itself. If you go online and you look for specific symptoms or illnesses, you often get an encyclopedia of information.

We provide very targeted and personalized information. If your child is very young and has a temperature of over a certain level, you may need to see the doctor. Based on the symptoms, we provide more nuanced coaching and feedback. That product has won a number of awards. It has appeared in Apple’s parenthood TV commercial. It’s sold in 7,000 retailers across the country. It’s got very high user reviews. We’re really proud of it. That product is out in the field.

We’re now seeing the benefits to the individual. We’re finally seeing that we have a real ground truth understanding of where and when illness is spreading. We know where and when fever and specific symptoms are spreading. Our recent analysis versus existing datasets show an unbelievably high correlation between our data and CDC’s but we’re many weeks ahead.

Sramana Mitra: Fascinating. I have lots of questions. I just realized that you’re also an MIT alumnus.

Inder Singh: I am.

Sramana Mitra: How much information can you get automatically? In the usage model that you’ve described, how much is being put in manually versus how much is just the thermometer picking up?

Inder Singh: The thermometer picks up temperature. If you look at the literature, it is suggestive that there’s illness irrespective of what the temperature is. For the specific use case of a child or anyone who’s really concerned about their illness, based on your age, fever level, and symptoms that you manually input, there’s a whole triage protocol around when, how, and what you should do. It’s particularly meant for younger children.

The other thing that we layer on top of that is a basic understanding of what’s going on around you. We have many people in the system. There’s a social health graph that we’ve created that allows you to understand whether the level of illness is high or low. It allows you to understand if the growth rate is high or low. It allows you to communicate with other parents at your child’s school.

At schools where we have reasonable penetration, we find that there’s a lot of active usage of this social platform. Parents ask things like, “My child has rosy red cheeks and a spike in fever. Do I go to the emergency room?” I remember a particular story. One parent responded in the middle of the night saying, “It sounds like Fifth disease. My daughter had it too. Doctor said there’s not much you can do. It’s highly contagious. Here’s a link to some information.”

Those are the kinds of social interactions that have happened in a subset of our users. Even before you get to that, it’s the basic medical guide. If you have a new born who has a fever, you need to see the doctor right away. You need to remember that even if it’s a child, you still don’t want to give them aspirin. These are very basic rules. I don’t remember the number of rules in the system right now. We’ve got several of those that are based primarily on fever as well as symptom inputs.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Inder Singh, CEO of Kinsa Health
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