Based on autopsy reports, over 40% of all medical diagnoses are incorrect. The errors in the medical industry cost a lot of time and money but most importantly many human lives. We attempt to create a platform for the rapid diagnosis of complex medical conditions using telemedicine that leverages cross-sectional expertise to rapidly identify possible problems that any single physician might miss.

An experiment for a better diagnostic approach

The process of medical treatment of patients is, without doubt, flawed. It incentivises treatment for financial reward and symptom assessment often lacks a wholistic approach, since every patients life is different. This leads to a lot of wrong diagnoses, little time for communication among specialists and dissatisfaction of patients as well as experts.

But what if there was way a different way to diagnose symptoms? My friend Tyler and I took some ideas from product design and efficient problem solving strategies and ran an experiment. In the following example, our patient came with a finger injury that wouldn't heal and using our process we were able to understand not only why it happened (she overtrained due to stress) but how short- and long term treatment within her personal lifestyle could be approached - immobilizing the finger, applying stress mitigation techniques, fixing sleep, eliminating inflammatory foods and finding a more supportive social environment. All of it, from interviewing the patient to writing up their individual report, took only around 4 hours. The results were extremely interesting.

The process schedule

In order to run this whole thing we use tools like Miro (remote whiteboard), Typeform (easy to use questionnaire), Zoom (user friendly video chat) and Notion (feature-rich writing). All of them attempt to re-create tools we know from the real world in a digital way in order to collaborate remotely. In this case Tyler and me were the "experts" but they can be physicians, nutritionists, fitness trainers, psychologists, etc. The combinations are case-specific and are decided after reviewing the patient health history form (see below).

The process of diagnosis and research is highly structured and time-boxed. This is very important to eliminate waste of time or overthinking, while being highly productive and fast.

The process effectively looks like this:

• Pre-Sprint: Patient fills out a health history form
• Day 1 - approximately 2 hours Patient and experts talk together on video chat to clarify details from the history form and understand the patients lifestyle. This takes 30 minutes. Experts write down everything the patient says and prioritise the symptoms by apparent importance. (~15 minutes) Experts do individual research on what these symptoms might mean. Without discussing any solutions, all research gets presented among the group to share any findings. (~60 minutes) Experts individually write up suggested short term treatment and long term solutions. (~15 minutes)

In case any tests (blood work, cortisol saliva tests) need to be done, the patient is directed to find his local GP and run those.

• Day 2 - approximately 2 hours Experts individually review test results. Experts individually write up a report based on all observations and how they would individually treat the patient (short- and long term). Experts post their writing onto a remote whiteboard for everyone to read. After everyone has read through it, they vote on the most useful data. Experts combine all highest voted results into one information sheet.

The results are being sent to the patient and a follow up call is suggested for an in-person review.

Based on this process, each expert gets a chance to view the patients symptoms from their perspective and make up their own mind without interfering with other specialists. All results are democratically combined into a single treatment plan, thus merging all points of view with no discussion.