NordicBaltic.Tech tracks the technology response to Covid-19 across the Nordic-Baltic region. The platform is made in partnership between the Nordic Council of Ministers and PUBLIC. In this video interview we spoke to Andreas Cleve, Co-founder and CEO of Danish HealthTech AI platform Corti. Tune in to hear more about how Corti adapted its technology to help healthcare professionals identify the difference between patients with high and low risks of Covid-19.
What do you do at Corti and why did you embark on this venture?
Hi guys, my name is Andreas Cleve and I am the CEO of Corti. So first I’m going to introduce Corti. At Corti we are building a digital conversational agent. A bit like Siri from Apple or Alexa from Amazon. Corti is built for something different from taking commands at home, it’s built for helping doctors diagnose patients. So Corti will listen in during patient conversations and help come up with ideas to what could be going on and how to diagnose the patients fastest and the most accurately.
We wanted to build something that had global potential impact and build on what humans do best in healthcare, driving empathy, making creative solutions and guarding patients. And giving them what computers do best which is memory and data storage and processing speed. So we thought what if we could build a digital assistant that would be able to remember millions of patients in its active memory And provide that as a second pinion directly to doctors and nurses when they are diagnosing patients. Since 2016 that’s the journey we’ve been on.
We are 55 people, majority in Copenhagen Denmark where we have strong partnerships with the nordic healthcare system. We also have offices in Europe especially in Vilnius, Lithuania where we have a lot of skilled people as well. The majority of what we do today is trying to train our AI to try and understand more and more languages and more kinds of symptom descriptions to help diagnose more patients.
How has corti adapted to face covid?
Corti had to come up with a new way to stay relevant through a crisis like this. Before Covid-19 we were focused on cardiac arrests and brain haemorrhages. Although that all still happens during a crisis and the readiness needs to stay the same, the hardship was to filter all the noise around Covid-19. To help the medical professionals face this challenge we built a skill that our AI is now proficient in Which is discriminating between high Covid risk and lower Covid risk by listening to patients describe how they are feeling, how their cough is and how their symptoms have developed. We have built this into several products that are used across the US and Europe and even in New Zealand where they also leverage Corti products.
Looking forward how do you think Covid-19 will change the demand for this type of service?
At Corti we believe that in the future we will only interact more with the healthcare sector – more apps more sensors. On all these platforms where you are interacting with an expert we want to be there. To support the patient but also to help and guide the healthcare professionals because they have can a bad day as well. That’s where leveraging the cumulative knowledge of millions of conversations from patients that might be feeling similarly can be powerful tool for a healthcare professional. To just have millions of cases in the active memory to build a second opinion on in a split second. We believe Corti will be in higher demand in the new world post Covid-19 when doctors will be sitting de-centrally not being able to examine the patient. Only relying on video and voice and that is exactly where we can help.
Describe the current challenges and benefits from working with governments.
So we are incredibly proud to be a startup capable of delivering software to governments that we all trust and rely on. Today some of our biggest customers are nation state customers like we support the entire nation of Sweden which we are incredibly proud of. To us the benefits are that it’s incredibly hard which builds a lot of trust. Trust is what you need in a crisis since the reliance on others can only be build on trust.
Luckily we have done that which builds on why startups can make a dent in the universe because we can go through all the hoops of medical trials and government procurement And actually prove that we are a long term trustworthy partner.
Any advice to other founders or governments at the moment?
I would say to founders, dig in, stay strong, things will of course be normalised and in this new world we will all be pushed towards more digital solutions And all you guys building those will have an important role to play in the future to help me and everybody else who will be a patient at some point. So dig in stay strong and stay committed. I think the important part is that we as startups have an incredible upside to work with governments. But a lot of the passionate people in the governments personally won’t have any upside other than doing their job incredibly well. So let’s make sure that they don’t have to take all the risk let’s try and gobble up as much as we can. And let’s see of we can help them spearhead and deliver even better services in the future.
For governments wanting to work with startups. Demand whatever you need to demand to make sure that you have something that you trust in that you want to deliver that you’re proud of. And we will try our best to live up to that. Keep trusting that startups can be there for you.
I think startups are getting better and better at the speed of light.
About Corti
Corti is an artificial intelligence platform for the healthcare industry. The AI can listen in on all patient interaction and interviews, delivering care diagnosis and triaging of patient over phone, video or in person. Based on the callers’ voice patterns, Corti’s is able to evaluate and triage the patient in real-time. Today Corti is operating in Scandinavia, UK, US, Australia and France.
