23 April 2018, India:
Twitter co-founder Biz Stone has invested in Health Chatbot Startup Visit. Stone made this investment in his personal capacity. BlueJeans Network co-founder Alagu Periyannan and Karthee Madasamy, a former top official of Qualcomm Ventures, Snapdeal co-founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal also participated in the funding round.
“People interact with the ‘Visit’ chatbot by sharing some symptoms. The bot follows up with relevant questions to collect more symptoms and risk factors (is the person hypertensive, diabetic, a smoker). This triaging is conversational and low stress,” Stone wrote in a blog post on Medium on Sunday.
Stone added, “Investing in Visit is my small way of contributing to a future where AI is seen as a positive enhancement of humanity that really does improve lives.”
Stone added, “People interact with the ‘Visit’ chatbot by sharing some symptoms. The bot follows up with relevant questions to collect more symptoms and risk factors (is the person hypertensive, diabetic, a smoker). This triaging is conversational and low stress.”
Stone informed, “The machines are trained using over 20,000 probabilistic relationships between variables such as conditions, symptoms, risk factors, past history, and more. Once a probable medical condition is determined, Visit connects the patient to one of over 2,000 health specialists all across India via video, phone, or chat so the right treatment can be put into place.”
Stone further added, “But it doesn’t end there. People can stay in touch with their practitioner over chat for follow-up. The objective is not to replace the doctor but to help practitioners in an assistive way by regular patient check-ins and reminders related to their care plan—including medication reminders, activity notifications, prescription re-fills, and other key factors.”
Visit was founded by Anurag Prasad, Vaibhav Singh, Shashvat Tripathi and Chetan Anand in 2016. It is an AI-powered chatbot for health advice learning from, and assisting, existing doctors.
(Image – LiveMint)