Idea Outline
"DirectHealth" is a web/mobile platform that allows citizens to interact, to be oriented and informed in the Healthcare industry.

The Challenge
The project is based on the development of innovative technologies that make it possible to search for information in an intelligent manner, organize the user’s own activities in relation to "health" in a more efficient way and to optimize their spending on examination and hospitalization. The main objective of the project is to use innovative technologies to promote and facilitate the knowledge and awareness of consumers towards health care facilities and doctors. The heart of technological innovation around which the entire system design rotates is linked to the use of complex techniques of computational linguistics, Natural language processing, machine translation, statistical analysis and semantic web tools.

The Solution

The main objective is to use innovative technologies to promote and facilitate the knowledge and awareness of consumers towards health care facilities and doctors. Access to the information provided by Direct Health is provided through a web portal or through a mobile application.
The user can type "head ache" and have information on specialized structures in migraine, doctors specializing in headache, nearby open pharmacies, without trying to replace consultation and experience of the doctor, but helping the user to find their way in the thousands of available informations.
We think also to implement some social network features where each search of healthcare facilities and doctors will be enriched by comments, suggestions, opinion left by other users.

Target group and social impact
The target market of our solution would be all the citizen who need to interact whit the healthcare industry, own a smartphone and can access to internet. Direct Health, through the development of an innovative digital service , and thanks to the new logical intermediary between supply and demand in health services could generate positive externalities in terms of: environmental sustainability (optimizing movements seeking the right structure from the beginning); saving money (citizen can understand clearly how much they would spend), spreading awareness on the "healthcare market", social inclusion (disadvantaged and immigrants through the implementation of a natural language processing software and machine translation software) and bridging the digital-divide.




Competences of the applicant
The team is composed by a former Consultant of IBM Italy with deep experience in the healthcare market and a group of talent developers and academic researchers in semantic web and information retrieval.