Courtney's Story

Today I want to talk to you about Courtney. Courtney was 29 when she died. She was my best friend Monique's sister. Courtney had a few health problems. About five years ago, she was in hospital for a bowel bleed. She had Crohn's disease, and they did the usual imaging, the CT scans, the abdominal scans, and found that the bleeding had stopped and she was ready to go home. So she was excited, family was excited. And what was discovered a year or two later is that the scan, buried on page three or four, had what's known as an incidental finding: a thing that they weren't looking for, but the radiologist saw nevertheless. And while they might have been looking to see if the bowel bleed was still going, there was the indication that she had the start of what could be breast cancer, which of course is very operable and very curable if you catch it quickly. But no one followed up. No one told her about it. No one told the family about it. It wasn't until it had spread that they looked back at all the historic notes to find it. Sadly, we lost Courtney a couple of years ago now. And this is a really sad story for LinkedIn, or for social media, or for wherever we're going to put this, but it is one of my inspirations for developing Vital Guard. Vital Guard uses AI to detect about 97% of incidental findings, and there are other people who do that. Our secret sauce, though, is to look through all the other notes, all the other communication with patients (what follow-ups you have scheduled, what was in your doctor's notes, what's in your discharge summary) to see: does anyone know about this? Is anyone going to do anything about this? Is anyone going to phone the patient or tell them that it's serious? And sadly, Courtney is not alone. We work with about 7 million ER and inpatients a year. About 70% of radiology in the ER is not followed up on. You come in with, maybe it's a motor vehicle crash, and they want to see if you've broken your collarbone, but they catch a nodule on your lung or something on your kidney, and it goes without disclosure. And we're losing lives, real lives, Courtney, over crap like this. And we could do better as an industry. And I know it's hard, or you think it's hard, it's going to cost a bunch of people. And we can automate the heck out of it: make sure people get a text message that tells them something serious is up. Let them read about it on their own. Disclose the lower priority things, or the lower risk things. Prime the pump and send them a text message that says you're going to get a phone call from this number, you're going to want to sit down and take this call even though it's an unknown number. And you just get a much higher response rate. So it feels weird to launch a product, but in commemoration of a friend, this is for you and for all the other patients like you.