How can you stop an outbreak before it becomes an epidemic? How do you know when and where symptoms start?
For Inder Singh MPP 2004, these questions are not rhetorical. He had seen, through his job at the Clinton Health Access Initiative, how expanding access to drugs could help millions of people with HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases—but he was frustrated that no one was collecting data that would allow society to prevent and even predict their spread.
“Kinsa was born out of that experience,” says Singh, referring to the company he founded in 2012—a company that continues to amass a vast trove of data that, through machine learning and advanced analytics, identifies hotspots of disease, predicts their spread, and forecasts the impact of infectious illnesses on the health system, such as surges in emergency department visits and where and when the stock of crucial medications may run low. It does this using one of the most common diagnostic tools available: a thermometer—which, says Singh, is “one of the only products that exists in the home that you can use to confirm illness.”
To Singh, the thermometer was always a means to an end. The company’s thermometers are unique because they connect to an app via Bluetooth to guide users to better care and treatment in the moment. With customer consent, the app then transmits the anonymized data, including temperature and self-reported symptoms, back to the company, which then aggregates and analyzes the information.
Says Singh, “We had to get years of data to see a pattern, in order to extrapolate. Only then could we truly say, ‘Yes, we can predict outbreaks.’ Shortly after we developed some amazing forecasting models, the COVID pandemic hit. And that’s when healthweather.us was born.”