The future of public health could start in R.I.

Posted

PROVIDENCE – Kira Radinsky, the chairwoman and chief technical officer of Diagnostic Robotics, of Tel Aviv, Israel, is on a mission to make health care available to everyone through an automated service that could start in Rhode Island.

In a Zoom talk hosted by the Rhode Island-Israel Collaborative on Jan. 26, as part of a monthly program featuring outstanding Israeli entrepreneurs, Radinsky outlined her company’s recent public-health research and advances.

“The idea is for each person in Rhode Island to know there is a doctor looking after them – whether it’s an automated, AI [artificial intelligence] doctor – [and] that it’s going to tell their doctor that something is wrong and they need help,” Radinsky said. “The system takes the medical record and updates the probability of a diagnosis to a higher percentage.”

Radinsky, a computer scientist who lives in Israel, says that within the next 10 years, 3.8 billion people worldwide will be without access to primary care.

“It’s not a prediction, it’s already a reality for some people,” she said.

Diagnostic Robotics’ system, which was in early beta testing in Rhode Island before the pandemic, is designed to read patient information, get answers to medical triage questions and predict the diagnosis before a doctor is called in. Radinsky said the company hopes to start a trial in Rhode Island before going global.

“My vision for the world [is] eventually getting to a point where every touch point in the clinical world starts with a system that can help the patient with their journey inside the medical system, and only get the doctors involved when needed,” she said.

“As an ER doc, I love it,” Brown University’s Dr. Megan L. Ranney, the moderator, chimed in. Brown’s Center of Digital Health hosts Diagnostic Robotics’ Rhode Island lab.

Radinsky also hopes her technology will help diagnose and treat behavioral-health issues. One of her main objectives in Rhode Island has been researching opioid addiction and how to identify addicts based on their patterns at doctor visits.

Recently, her company has shifted to assisting exclusively with COVID-19 studies and helping to predict the spread of the virus in specific areas within two weeks in order to reduce positive cases. Her data has already contributed to the discovery of some COVID-19 symptoms, including loss of taste and smell.

Radinsky hopes her data will change the future of medical research.

“An automated way of mining what we as humans leave after us for the next generations will leave lots of data. And when documented, we can actually mine this to make medical discoveries a lot faster than what we are doing today,” she said.

Radinsky is the founder of SalesPredict, which was acquired by eBay in 2016, and served as eBay’s chief scientist. She received international recognition for her work at Technician & Microsoft Research, for developing predictive algorithms that recognize the early warning signs of globally impactful events, including epidemics and political unrest. She also serves as a board member for the Israel Securities Authority and on the technology board of HSBC Bank.

The lecture was in collaboration with Venture Cafe Providence and the Consulate General of Israel of New England. It was moderated by Ranney, an emergency physician and national advocate for innovative approaches to public health.

SETH CHITWOOD is a freelance writer from Barrington and the creative director of the production company Angelwood Pictures. Reach him at www.sethchitwood.com.