EpiFinder offers a proven tool that empowers people to take ownership of their health, connect with their doctor, advance epilepsy and neurology research and is telling their story on KickStarter.
November is Epilepsy Month and Scottsdale, Arizona based EpiFinder, Inc. chose November 6, 2017 as the perfect day to launch its campaign on the KickStarter funding platform.
Per the Institute of Medicine report ‘Epilepsy Across the Spectrum,’ epilepsy is a brain disease that manifests as seizure events. In the United States alone, epilepsy affects 3.2 million people with 150,000 new epilepsy cases ever year. Of these, as many as 40% of patients with epilepsy are misdiagnosed and suffer from uncontrolled seizures, which limits their independence at best and can result in death at worst. People often suffer for years before their epilepsy can be correctly identified and treated. The monetary cost of epilepsy misdiagnosis and mismanagement of healthcare is $12.5 billion annually.
Currently, according to EpiFinder’s KickStarter page, the rates of misdiagnosis of epilepsy are as high as 40% with patients going from doctor to doctor suffering for 10-15 years with uncontrollable seizures. This is because there are more than 50 different types of epilepsy. Our Seizure and Epilepsy Patient Portal App significantly improves the accuracy of and time to diagnosis by providing more correct epilepsy syndromes to consider in less than 10-15 seconds to the doctor. (Mayo Clinic IRB approved study will be published in December)
“By providing quicker and more accurate diagnoses for an epilepsy syndrome, EpiFinder reduces health care costs for hospitals, enables doctors to provide personalized medicine, and helps to improve the quality of life for their patients.” –Robert Yao, CEO of EpiFinder, Inc.
EpiFinder provides value to patients by providing them a time-independent platform that can collect all the information they wish to provide first, saving them money and endless frustration. An algorithm then analyzes this data and presented to the doctor within the context of the latest knowledge. The doctor is then freed to understand the patient better and empowered to make better decisions about identification and management of the condition.
EpiFinder co-founders believe they have developed a sustainable business model that will result in exponential growth because it relies on a robust AI for all complex disease. While their initial launch will focus on decision support for epilepsy, the company’s goal is to expand the system for other neurologic or psychiatric diseases and eventually to more complex, rare, or hard to diagnose conditions. By translating science to improve people’s health, the team at EpiFinder is working hard to turn the art of medicine into a science.
“At the heart of EpiFinder,” says Mehta, “are the people. They achieve excellence and create value within their chosen fields while working in a collaborative and supportive environment.”
EpiFinder’s award winning, multidisciplinary team includes Biomedical Informaticist and software developers with expertise in artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, machine learning, and statistics. The company’s leadership has received numerous recognitions, and together, they work in harmony to deliver a product that can change lives on a global scale.
“EpiFinder’s vision is to revolutionize the care of all neurological disorders by combining cutting edge scientific research with the latest technologies to the doctor-patient relationship”, said Neel Mehta, at the 14th conference on Anti-epileptic Drug and Device Trials, held every two years and sponsored by The Epilepsy Study Consortium in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania and the Epilepsy Foundation.
The team has been successfully sharing its story across the community. In 2016, EpiFinder was featured at the AZBio Convergence conference, won the prestigious Spirit of Enterprise award and raised over $500,000 in investments and grant funding from angel investors, Flinn Foundation, and many others.