People

How a small health tech startup beat Alphabet with a coronavirus screening tool

It didn't take 1,700 engineers to build a symptoms checker that could help save lives.

Screenshot of the coronavirus checker website

A new site from a startup called Vital lets consumers assess their risk of COVID-19.

Screenshot: C19check.com

On March 13, President Trump seemingly shocked Alphabet by announcing to the world that Google was working on a screening tool for the coronavirus. He said the company had 1,700 engineers working on it and something would be up "very quickly." The following Monday, Verily, Google's life-sciences sister company, released a screening tool for parts of the Bay Area, and rather quickly hit capacity. And if you were showing signs for the virus, it wasn't even very helpful.

But a new site, a collaboration between Emory University in Atlanta and the health software company Vital, aims to help where Verily's site has so far stumbled. Together, they're launching Coronavirus Checker, a site that uses current clinical guidelines and simple language to help people figure out if they're truly at risk.


Get what matters in tech, in your inbox every morning. Sign up for Source Code.


Vital's CEO Aaron Patzer, who previously founded Mint, told Protocol that back in late February, he was first inspired to look into building a tool like this. The company's main software offering is an AI tool that helps manage patient flow in emergency rooms, and it's mainly being used in the Atlanta area. "I could see this coming," Patzer said, adding that the infection numbers in the U.S. are likely lagging "three to seven days" behind actual figures, given the amount of testing that's been done to date. He said he expected there to be some tools out there — well before Google was even brought up by the president. "There was nothing, there were no tools," he said.

Even after Verily launched its screening tool, Patzer was underwhelmed. "We were shocked. Google barely had anything," he said.

Vital's 20-odd person team set on the task of helping to "flatten the curve" — an increasingly common expression used to describe efforts to ease the potential strain COVID-19 could put on countries' medical systems. Many of the components in Vital's system were already built, Patzer said, and were already on a HIPAA-compliant platform, given the software the company usually builds, which helped speed up the process. The actual data for the quiz in the system comes from the constantly updated CDC guidelines, as well as the SORT algorithm, originally designed for screening for swine flu back in 2009. "It's gone through many, many months of rigor," Patzer said.

The system categorizes people into three broad categories — low, medium and high risk — and will recommend next steps accordingly. If you're low or medium risk, it may well tell you to self-isolate or follow up with a doctor, and if you're at a high risk of having the virus, it'll tell you to seek immediate medical attention. It's also written in plain English, instead of doctor-speak; rather than asking your BMI, it asks if you wear shirts larger than a XXL.

The checker asks for users' ZIP codes to help figure out if there are unreported hot spots of coronavirus, and the data will be made available to public-health officials and epidemiologists. The site should be light enough to avoid crashing out, Patzer said, unlike many other sites that have been struggling under the weight of coronavirus traffic. The algorithm actually runs in JavaScript on a device's browser, so even if the company's servers go down, users should still be able to complete the quiz, Patzer said. "We should be able to handle literally millions of people per day," he added.

Patzer puts Vital's ability to put out a comprehensive screening tool before any of the big tech companies down to the company's size, expertise and connections. Patzer's sister, Rachel Patzer, is an epidemiologist at Emory, and his co-founder, Justin Schrager, is the head of Emergency Medicine at Emory Hospital Group — and just happens to be Patzer's brother-in-law. Emory also frequently works with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as it's just down the road.

The Vital team didn't need 1,700 engineers to spin up the project over the last few weeks, and being able to communicate in a close-knit team that could reuse work they'd already built likely helped as well.

"We basically built what Trump said Google built," Patzer said.


Get in touch with us: Share information securely with Protocol via encrypted Signal or WhatsApp message, at 415-214-4715 or through our anonymous SecureDrop.


Over the last couple of days, the site has been tested at Emory and the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where the checker is going through a review process. In the next few days, Patzer's team plans to roll the service out in several other languages, and provide email or text-message followups to remind people to keep checking their symptoms.

Verily declined to comment.

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins