Ada Health

Ada Health GmbH is a company based in Berlin which operates Ada, a symptom checker app.

It was founded by Claire Novorol, a British pediatrician, Martin Hirsch and Daniel Nathrath. Nathrath is a graduate of the University of Houston Law Center. The company has raised $69.3 million since it was founded in 2011.

The app started out as a platform service for doctors and was adapted in 2016 to focus on the bits patients could understand. The app takes reported symptoms, matches them with symptoms of patients of similar age and gender, and reports the statistical likelihood that the patient has a certain condition. The detailed report, compiled by Ada, can be sent to a doctor as a PDF.[1]

The app is available in English, German, Spanish and Portuguese.[2] In September 2018 it had been downloaded about five million times. It is free of charge and has the highest consumer ranks among similar apps.[3] It is to be made available in Swahili and in Romanian thanks to funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Fondation Botnar.

Ada has been compared to WebMD, Babylon's GP at Hand app and Your.MD. In October 2017, when three apps were tested with symptoms from asthma, shingles, alcohol-related liver disease, and urinary tract infection, Ada performed very well; it asked about the most important symptoms and provided the best diagnoses. It produced diagrams showing which of the symptoms for each disease were present and the strength of the link, and a diagram of the percentage of people likely to have that diagnosis.[4]

Future plans include customizing the software to collect data on the prevalence of diseases, like malaria, which may help to prevent epidemics.[5]

In October 2019 a German IT security professional claimed that the Ada app was sending sensitive user-data (f.e. symptoms, IPs, Android ad IDs etc) to the Amplitude product analytics service (api.amplitude.com), and some German users' insurance provider to their Facebook Analytics account. [6] [7]

References
  1. "A free service lets you type in your illness symptoms and learn what's ailing you — and the startup behind it has raised $69 million". Business Insider. 5 September 2018. Retrieved 22 September 2018.
  2. "Ada health app launches in Spanish and Portuguese". Pharmaforum. 24 August 2018. Retrieved 22 September 2018.
  3. "Meet Ada, the multilingual 'doctor' in your pocket created by former Houston student". Houston Chronicle. 14 September 2018. Retrieved 22 September 2018.
  4. "Can you really trust the medical apps on your phone?". Wired. 1 October 2017. Retrieved 22 September 2018.
  5. "Gates Foundation Backs Self-Checkup App's Africa Expansion". Bloomberg. 10 October 2018. Retrieved 11 October 2018.
  6. "Ada: Gesundheits-App mit Facebook-Tracker". Kuketz. 19 September 2019. Retrieved 14 October 2019.
  7. "Massive Datenschutzmängel in der Gesundheits-App Ada". Kuketz. 10 October 2019. Retrieved 14 October 2019.
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