MUMBAI: In 1999, three-year-old Isabel Maude was diagnosed with a routine case of chicken pox. But there was more to Isabel’s disease than what met her doctor’s eye. Isabel’s skin had a bluish discolouring; she complained of fever, severe pain, and had to be rushed to St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, London.

Isabel spent two months in the intensive care unit (ICU) after developing multiple organ failure and a cardiac arrest. That’s when the doctors finally diagnosed Isabel as suffering from Toxic Shock Syndrome and Necrotising Fasciitis (described colloquially as the ‘flesh-eating bug’).

“It was this tiny tot’s near-death experience that inspired her parents Jason and Charlotte Maude to launch an unique project along with me, instead of suing the hospital for wrong diagnosis,” said Dr Joseph Britto, who was then the Pediatric Intensive Care Consultant at St Mary’s Hospital, London. Today, this project—a diagnosis-decision support software named after Isabel—has a database of 10,000 diseases and is widely used as a diagnostic tool in hospitals in the UK and US.

“All that a healthcare professional has to do is log on to www.isabelhealthcare.com and feed the patient’s symptoms—fever, sore eyes, cough, breathlessness, etc. For a given set of clinical features, ‘Isabel’ instantly provides a checklist of likely diagnosis, related diagnoses and causative drugs. ‘Isabel’ also helps find specific answers to clinical questions,” said Britto, CEO and co-founder, Isabel Healthcare Inc. Britto, who passed out of Grant Medical College, JJ Hospital, is currently in Mumbai to initiate talks with city hospitals to adopt ‘Isabel.’

“In layman’s terms, ‘Isabel’ is like a ‘Google’ for medical diagnosis. However, while Google uses a standard key word search, ‘Isabel’ uses an unique sophisticated pattern recognition software, which is able to intelligently ‘read’ any document, and deliver the result,” explained Britto. “The problem with medicine is that as a knowledge-based professional, the doctor is required to memorise huge data related to thousands of diseases. Apart from this, the doctor must remain up to date with modern technological developments and advancements in research,” he added.

But it is physically impossible to do so accurately day in and day out. “That’s where ‘Isabel’ can effectively provide a second opinion of sorts. It takes away the burden of memory—not only does ‘Isabel’ have accurate data about almost every disease known to man, but it also has a database of published journal abstracts and case histories,” said Britto.

Isabel’s services do not come free. While it offers a month’s free trial, hospitals and healthcare providers have to make an annual subscription. “We charge US$90 (Rs4,000) per bed. Which means a 100 bed hospital has to pay Rs4 lakh for Isabel,” said Britto. But that’s a small price to pay for saving thousands of lives with accurate diagnosis, added Britto as a parting shot.