Ritu Jha-
No more carrying around suitcases full of medical records, health records of you and your family are now easily accessible on an app. TikaHealth App seeks to empower user-patients and their families by keeping health records digitized, accessible, and ready to be shown to doctors in case of an emergency or even to consult them for treatment protocols.
TikaHealth is an app designed to put essential medical records in your own hands. The app enables you to own and control essential medical records of you and your loved ones, including your pets. It also provides reminders for vaccines required and up-to-date information on recommended travel vaccinations.
The founder of TikaHealth, Felix Oen[Above 2nd from left in blue], spoke to indica about his plans to empower patients and their families to take care of themselves more effectively. One of his prime focuses for the intervention that is offered by TikaHealth is in India. Oen believes that patient experiences and organizational outcomes will depend largely on the capabilities of AI to bring benefits to patients and clinicians by eliminating uncertainties and making large-scale data analysis possible. AI eliminates uncertainty by streamlining various processes in healthcare practices around the world–including in homes and villages in underserved communities.
“I developed TikaHealth when I was at MIT-Harvard Medical School in March of 2020, essentially during COVID that I built and developed TikaHealth. What I wanted to do was to give everyone visibility and control over the medical records of their families, in terms of vaccination, medication, chronic conditions, allergies because different countries have different protocols. After COVID, the platform underwent a natural evolution that largely entails incorporating all your medical records, lab results, MRIs, CT Scans etc. What I wanted to achieve was patient empowerment to bring health equality to everybody. Whether you are rich or poor, you will have access to your medical files. And, I wanted to raise the standard of care for everyone,” Oen told indica. “If you need medical help anywhere in the world, you can now show it to the doctors by using TikaHealth App. Not only that, you can manage your medical profiles on your own. Medical records of your grandparents, parents, children, and grandchildren can be viewed together in this app. You don’t have to carry all the files around with you,” Oen added.
The app is available on the App Store whether is it Android or iOS. For people who don’t have the app, I’m building something that is on the web. “They will be able to access that from any part of the world where there’s the internet. But that is currently being built by my team,” Oen said. “The idea is to help Indian society and other countries in Asia like Taiwan. Because Asia is very diverse and people speak many different languages, when they travel overseas some people can’t speak Japanese, Korean, or Chinese. I wish to help the population and the communities to raise the standard of health care and standard of living.”
“TikaHealth App is important because the last thing that people will ever know or do is basically to look at, or understand their medical files and things like what is their medication, what are their drug allergies, and chronic conditions. But this knowledge is important because when one travels overseas, one sometimes may not know their medical history. I’m telling people that they don’t have to remember everything by heart. TikaHealth will give it to you,” he added.
Oen visited India in 2022 at the invitation of Professor Anuraj Miral, his mentor at Stanford Biodesign. “He invited me to his hometown in Raipur in November last year. I saw the inefficiencies of the system, people and doctors carry large suitcases containing years and years of their medical files. Professor Anuraj knows that I have this platform – TikaHealth. He has sought my help for digitization and easy accessibility of medical records through the app. I also went to Hyderabad and Jaipur, and I am working with hospitals and clinics there to empower patients.”
Through TikaHealth Oen seeks to educate the public and help them take care of their family’s medical health. “If you rely just on the doctors alone, it might not be enough. I spoke to many doctors in India, and they all work very long hours. The reason for this is it’s a populous country and the demands are very high. What I’m saying is that I can give you the information, you don’t have to call the doctor. And, to the doctors, I’m saying that they should empower their patients. With blockchain and Artificial Intelligence, patients will be able to have greater visibility of their medical files. That is one of the main reasons the technology is built on blockchain. The medical file uploaded to the app consists of all your medical records – medications, lab tests, and x-ray images as well.”
“My challenge today is to educate the public, the Indian population, that they should take care of their family’s health. Someone within the family can help maintain their health records. They don’t need to rely on the doctor because the doctors don’t have the time. I’m saying that I will make sure that the relevant medical information is available to you at all times. But, someone within the family should be able to take charge of maintaining the family’s records,” Oen told indica.
For India, where doctors usually write prescriptions on paper, Oen has a unique solution. “You can take a picture of that piece of paper and upload it into the file. I have a system that can do vision computing to recognize, validate, and upload it onto the corresponding medical file. So even though you lose your paper, and that information, you don’t have to worry because everything is on the file in a digital format.”
The use of AI in bioinformatics has proved to be highly beneficial in managing and analyzing biological data. The merging of bioinformatics and AI analytics can be utilized for DNA sequencing, protein classification, and generative modeling for protein structure. As such TikaHealth is working with various Cancer Centres in the world in developing a single framework that will enable the processing and analyzing of biological data at unprecedented rates. It can surely be said that the future of bioinformatics lies in analyzing a tremendous amount of data with AI algorithms to provide huge savings in time and money, which will further accelerate biological research benefiting patients and bringing greater quality of care.
Felix Oen is a mentor with Stanford CARE, Stanford Biodesign, UCSF HealthHub, Taipei Medical University Hospital, Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, Plug and Play Health Accelerator, MassChallenge Boston.