Once again, Vertical Accelerator received an enormous amount of applications for their Spring 2017 program. 260 applications from 53 different countries, to be exact. With the selected ten teams digital health will never be the same again!

Now, let us introduce one of the teams: Etsimo. Their solution is the starting point of the care process. They use artificial intelligence to help the patient describe her symptoms, and based on that they can determine her condition, care need and the next steps.

Etsimo originally started from a generic visual search engine. The engine is a result of several years’ research conducted at the Helsinki Institute of Information Technology HIIT, and it has three pending patents. 

“The engine can predict the user’s intent, i.e. what she wants to find, based on the search clause. We use machine learning to do this, and the intent itself is displayed visually on the screen in the form of relevant keywords. The user can refine her search with the speed of thought by manipulating the keywords shown on the visual representation to update the results, which makes searching a visual and interactive process”, says Thomas Grandell, CEO of Etsimo.

“We met with HUS in the end of 2015 to see if we could help solving one of their challenges regarding identifying rare diseases in time, i.e. if we would be able to create impulses for the physician to examine a few more things outside their diagnosis to eliminate the possibilities of the patient’s condition being a rare disease. Our engine wasn’t a perfect fit at the time, as the whole point of our engine was to widen the search for maximum findability, whereas HUS was looking for something a little more exact. However, the whole problem intrigued us, so we started working on a diagnosing assistant, and here we are!”

The guys at Etsimo started hearing good things about Vertical a few months before the deadline for applying for the spring batch. Grandell began looking into what it was all about. 

"I was most impressed with the program itself and the partners, and the large amount of interesting and experienced people mentoring the participants. Through my network, I managed to get introduced to Kenneth Salonius, and I met with him to see if he thought applying to the spring 2017 batch would be a good thing to do. As a result of a very interesting meeting we applied, and we’re extremely proud of being among the selected companies.”

The program so far has exceeded the team’s expectations.

“People at Vertical are extremely well connected and eager to set up meetings with just the right kind of expertise.”

The future looks very good for Etsimo.  Everybody they’ve been talking to understand both what they are doing and how it brings added value in terms of using technology to improve the care process and the customer experience while at the same increase the efficiency for the provider.

“It’s a win-win both for the patients and the providers.”