Blog 13: KnowYourMeds (Creda Health)
Chronic care management beyond the doctor's office
Company: KnowYourMeds (soon to be renamed Creda Health) is an AI powered digital health platform that addresses a critical care gap by enabling “continuum of care” relationships between patients and their providers. Over 100 million Americans suffer from one or more chronic conditions and need help with managing their diseases in between visits to their doctors. For a variety of reasons, patients don’t have 24/7 access to their providers and often end up making decisions that are injurious to their health. Creda Health’s mission is to bring together AI technology and human specialists to help improve health outcomes for hundreds of millions of people worldwide in an affordable manner. The company also has a world renowned medical advisory board, headed by Dr. Sanjiv Chopra, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and a specialist in Hepatology and Gastroenterology.
HQ Location & Year Founded: Waltham, MA, 2017
Founder: Kim Shah was most recently Global Director of Marketing for the Informatics Software business within Thermo Fisher Scientific, a $40 billion company whose mission is to enable their customers to make the world healthier, cleaner and safer.
During his career, Shah has held executive level positions at a number of high-tech public companies such as Lotus Development, Micrografx and Inso Corporation. Shah is a graduate of Imperial College, University of London and holds an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
Funds Raised and VC Investors: $4 million from Innospark and angels
1. Where did the idea for KnowYourMeds originate?
I co-founded the company four years ago alongside our chairman, Dr. Venkat Srinivasan. We had a desire to do something big from an impact and mission point of view. We looked at health as a massive area for technology disruption. A lot of us suffer from chronic conditions. Between doctor visits, however, most of the responsibility that we have for our own health relies on the actions that we take. Chronic disease conditions progress if we don’t actively manage them intelligently. The pandemic brought this issue into even sharper relief. People all over the world didn’t or couldn’t see their doctors and had to fend for themselves as best as they could. We didn’t see people doing enough here in the US that focused on this, let alone in the rest of the world such as Asia, Africa and Latin America.
2. What is the key problem that KnowYourMeds intends to solve?
We wanted to help patients who are willing to help themselves achieve healthier outcomes. Our AI powered application provides personalized warning, alerts, reminders about various actions that the patient is recommended to take to manage their conditions; it relies on an underlying disease progression model configured to the physician’s liking; and it provides access to specialists such as pharmacists, nutritionists and physical therapists. As a holistic part of managing their disease condition, the application also makes it easy for users to keep track of their drug adherence, their symptoms and vital signs and their dietary intake.
3. How are you most differentiated as a service?
We first built a giant database of 250,000 drug names, including brand name and generics, and also active ingredients. We gathered data from available from user reports from the FDA and WHO, and ended up with 50 millions records. This was pretty messy to sort through, but we launched version one in October 2019 as a free app that was downloadable from anywhere. A user downloads the app, puts in their current drugs, including prescription and over the counter (OTC), and we start feeding back any available information on side effects, drug interactions, contraindications, foods to avoid, etc.
In our next phase, we started using AI to determine what people’s chronic conditions might be based on the drugs they’re taking. We considered gender, age, and other factors to share with users what they should be thinking about, such as scheduling colonoscopies, mammograms, etc. We follow official guidance from public health authorities. The platform is meant to show “what you can do” about your health for those who care to stay diligent.
4. How many users have you had using the platform to date?
We have around 50-60,000 active users of the app, of which two-thirds are in the US, nearly a third in India, plus a smattering in 100 other countries.
5. What lies ahead in the product plans for KnowYourMeds?
We are in the process of changing our name to Creda Health to reflect that we are not going to be just about medications. From a business standpoint, we plan to solve the black hole of what happens to patients when they are not at the clinic by helping clinics to “keep an eye” on them. We have started working with a GI clinic on patients with IBD, Crohn’s, Colitis, and will add other areas as well. We will do so through a revenue partnership with the clinics. We expect to have 20 clinics working with us by the end of the year and are in active discussions with some large groups of clinics.
We are also working directly with patients for diseases like diabetes and hypertension and we target having 10,000 direct subscribers on the platform by the end of this year and one million by 2025.
In developing countries like India, the skill level of medical practitioners ranges from the Harvard-trained doctor in Mumbai to no qualified doctor in a village. We plan to bring the ability for a nurse-level provider to ask relevant diagnostic questions. We put the patient in touch with the right doctor. We make the process more efficient. We will offer more comprehensive intervention with our personalized disease models, by creating an ecosystem of specialists on our platform, a chat function using AI + humans.
6. What are the long-term strategic growth objectives?
From a social impact point-of-view, we feel that we can serve hundreds of millions of people. We have a relationship in India with a company called Karma Health that will vastly extend our reach. In rural India, some people are not health-literate enough to understand the information we are asking for and subsequently providing. The solution is nurse-augmented telehealth. A villager comes to a clinic with a problem and a nurse does the triage. From there, a telehealth visit is conducted with a doctor. Karma Health does the human part, and Creda Health will provide the technology, including AI-driven diagnostics.
From the revenue side, even with our goal of making this affordable so we can reach as many people as possible, this can easily be a $100 million business or more. In addition to subscribers, reimbursements from insurers is a real possibility over time. The other side is our AI engine. As we validate it with clinical endpoints, as we think we can, then it has huge potential.
Medication is often more art than science. Practitioners don’t know what medicine or dosage will work the best right away. It may need to be adjusted based on trial-and-error. Dosage may be different for one person versus another based on nationality and other classes of people. We intend to be able to recommend to clinicians with our data and AI what could work best.
Ron’s Take
It has become almost cliché to say that healthcare ought to be a basic human right for all people anywhere in the world, no matter what their socio-economic status, nationality, age, gender, ethnic, or racial background. And yet we are so far from this goal that it is almost incomprehensible. Entrepreneurs such as Kim Shah and Dr. Venkat Srinivasan are re-thinking what tools are possible through the application if AI and mobile technology to get every person basic information and access to treatment and prevention. They have used their Western education, experience, and strong professional networks, to move quickly toward bringing healthcare to those who lack what many of us who are privileged take for granted. With additional funding and partnerships, the Creda Health model can have a significant impact scaling not only in India, but across the world including the Western developed world, where many still lack access to important and timely information to help them monitor their health for all of the time when they are not able to sit in the same room as their provider.