Ubie Health: Say Hello to Automatic Triage

Preface: Since we are all residents and we know nothing better, we are going to write these review letters like SOAP notes: Subjective, Objective, Assessment, and Plan. Subjective is the general history of the companies (like family history, past medical history, etc), objective is the product itself (like our lab values, imaging findings), assessment is what we think of the product, and plan is what we envision our clinic doing in the future.

Subjective:

Ubie is a Tokyo-based health-tech startup, co-founded by medical doctor, Yoshinori Abe, and engineer, Kota Kubo. The company was established with the mission of creating a healthcare guide for everyone, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) as its core technology. Ubie has developed a global health-tech platform that offers AI disease prediction for consumers, SaaS (Software as a Service) products for healthcare providers, and marketing solutions for pharmaceutical organizations. The company has developed two key products. The first, Ubie for Hospital, also known as AI Monshin, is a B2B product targeting medical institutions. This software serves as a medical questionnaire tool, helping doctors reduce the time required for taking patient histories. The second product, Dr. Ubie, is a consumer-facing AI symptom checker app. This app allows users to understand their symptoms by answering questions prompted by the AI, offering insights based on the disease information. The app has found significant use, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, providing an online screening and triage tool to help differentiate between COVID-19 and other ailments.

I am extremely interested in Ubie's second product, Dr. Ubie, as it addresses a critical issue I've observed in the hospital setting. I've cared for patients who could have avoided hospitalization if they hadn't delayed consulting a medical professional when their symptoms first appeared. Often, these patients delayed seeking help due to embarrassment or shame about discussing their symptoms with a human medical professional. This is precisely where I see the value of a medical chatbot like Dr. Ubie, which could assist patients in risk stratifying their symptoms early on, potentially preventing the escalation of their conditions.

Objective:

For this section, I will document the typical user experience for Ubie’s Dr. Ubie AI symptom checker app.

From a doctor’s perspective, it makes me appreciate how many differentials can be narrowed down with just a yes or no question. However, past medical history can get more complicated, and Ubie provides lists of conditions as well as free-text to help patients build their medical history.

On to the chief complaint that is also in free-answer format with a list of commonly searched symptoms. Love the emojis! The user interphase friendliness is a huge motivator for me to finish this questionnaire.

I think I’m having a heart attack… There was a place where I could draw on a torso the location of my pain, which is like asking a patient to point with one finger where it hurts the most.

As I finished up the questionnaire, there were still some questions thrown in to clarify some history. If you’re really in a tight spot, you can skip questions in the bottom right hand corner. Now on to the analysis:

There is a great section that writes about the most likely diagnosis, why the AI picked this disease, what to watch out for, what the other possible diagnoses are, and how the disease is treated.

There’s even a “What to tell your doctor” tab that summarizes what you’ve inputted so the patient can quickly explain to future practitioners what they are feeling.

At the end, by clicking the “Find Available Doctors” button the patient is sent to the HealthTap webpage where they can be connected with a local doctor.

Assessment:

The one-liner:

"A user-friendly, AI-generated and assisted service that enables those curious about their symptoms to obtain risk stratification."

I love it.

In less than five minutes, I was able to receive a mini-consultation, informing me whether I should be concerned enough to visit the ER. This could potentially replace or augment ER nursing triages in the future. Imagine entering an ER where you're directed to a booth equipped with a monitor, blood pressure cuff, and pulse oximeter. All your vitals would be scanned into the chart automatically while you answer questions. Within five minutes, you would have a quick summary of the patient's clinical information ready.

For primary or urgent care clinics, envision seeing Dr. Ubie's "My Summary" page as part of the patient intake sheet you review before seeing the patient. Now, imagine if Ubie integrated with your EHR and automatically converts the patient’s inputs into an HPI and ROS, saving you precious time.

This type of technology could also potentially replace overnight answering services for primary care clinics. If Ubie releases an audio version or speech-to-text edition of Dr. Ubie, our patients who call at 2am with health-related questions could receive a similar experience, allowing the on-call physician a quick summary of what the patient is calling about.

However, a downside to the experience is the limitation in the choices and suggestions offered for certain prompts. If I don’t find anything similar to what I’m experiencing, I might be inclined to stop using it. There’s also the potential for erroneous diagnoses or recommendations from the app, or misinterpretations by the user, which could be dangerous. I would add a big bold exclamation mark to the summary page if I really thought my patient was having a myocardial infarction or a stroke for example.

Plan:

I truly believe that Dr. Ubie has the potential to be a life-saving technology, benefiting not only patients' health but also outpatient practitioners. A practical application could involve integrating a version of Dr. Ubie into your practice's patient portal interface. With this technology, patients could either be reassured or directed straight to the emergency room for obvious cases, leaving the 'grey area cases' for a human practitioner to triage. This could reduce the volume of visits and phone calls a practice receives. However, I do see the necessity to follow up with these patients to monitor their actions and check on their clinical status.

The time-saving potential of Dr. Ubie is nothing short of amazing. Overall, I am extremely impressed with Dr. Ubie and would love to incorporate a version of it into my future outpatient practice's patient portal for patient use.

If anyone from Ubie is reading this, we at AI My Clinic would be thrilled to be beta testers for future products! 😉 

And to our other readers, please reply to this email and let us know what you think! Would you use this product?

Signing out,

Chase Cho, DO