Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Inder Singh, CEO of Kinsa Health (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You are a venture-funded company?

Inder Singh: We are. We’ve raised $25 million. We’re backed by a number of great investors including Kleiner Perkins who, as you know, is the earliest investor in Amazon and Google and has done a bunch of work in life sciences. We’ve also got some support from some international investors including GSR, Founder Collective, and a number of wonderful angels who have supported us even in the early days.

Sramana Mitra: What metrics can you share in terms of adoption? How many thermometers are in use? How many apps have been triggered?

Inder Singh: I can only provide some details on that. As you know, we’re a private company. Some of it is sensitive and confidential. We have several hundred thousand users. Several hundred thousand households are using our product. The average household has nearly three profiles. They’re usually households with children. Over a million people have used the product.

We have some interesting data that we’ll be providing to the public about usage. It’s data that you would expect the system might have had but really doesn’t. It’s been very fascinating to see usage. We’ve got four Fortune 200 companies that have made Kinsa part of either their family health benefits or their new parents kit. Those are the big pieces.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. What is your estimate of rate of penetration? What kind of coverage do you need to be able to predict trends? The end game here is a Big Data end game, right?

Inder Singh: I would call it small data. It’s not terabytes of data. What I’m excited about is we’re already there. We already have the most accurate and earliest system ever created to track the spread of infectious illness. Although we haven’t published the data, I’m thrilled that we have what we have. To be clear, people are asking us for it already. We’re working with a few academic groups right now.

Let’s assume that you knew where and when an illness is starting. You know on a national basis as well as on a local basis whether the illness level is high or low. What could you do? I’ll provide a big grandiose use case and I’ll provide a concrete, narrowly-defined use case as examples of things that the system and individuals could do. At the system level, if you have really accurate and real-time data, you would be able to intervene. There’s a whole cascade of effects that occurs when local public heath agencies gets a vaccine campaign.

In the peak of cold and flu season, the literature suggests that nearly 65% of emergency room visits are associated with cold and flu. If you knew that, you could staff things differently and really make the system respond as a whole. Let’s provide one narrowly-defined use case. Let’s say it’s a CPG company. Their sales are correlated with cold and flu. Orange juice sales are highly correlated with cold and flu. Obviously, cough and cold medicines are correlated but disinfectants are as well.

Many of those companies are often looking for early insights. For those companies, this kind of data is very valuable. If you could get it 12 weeks ahead of time, then you might have a shot at affecting the vaccine production. A number of the big media outlets now are saying, “We’re due for a very bad pandemic flu year at some point in the near term.” There was an article that talked about how the world is due for a severe pandemic flu. In that case, the system can respond. Even the local communities can say, “It’s starting.” For parents, it’s important too.

Sramana Mitra: Great. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Inder Singh, CEO of Kinsa Health
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