The fast-growing dermatology start-up Legit Health joined the second batch of the acceleration program that connects entrepreneurial talent with Almirall’s mentors to generate synergies and improve the flow of innovation.

The Digital Garden, powered by Almirall, is a program aimed at creating synergies between the company’s executives and entrepreneurs in the health industry to speed up the pace of innovation and help start-ups reach the next level.

One of such innovations is Legit.Health. This AI-powered technology analyses the widest range of patient-reported outcomes, from images to scoring systems, and summarizes and translates all the information into a clinical language, useful to the physician and actionable into delivering value-based healthcare.

This start-up is now part of the second batch of the Digital Garden. By supporting Legit Health, Almirall’s Digital Garden is partnering with a wide range of next-generation dermatologists that use Legit Health to improve health outcomes and ultimately bring the latest technology to the doctor’s offices.

According to Andy Aguilar, the company’s CEO, participating in this program “offers a great opportunity to learn  from the company’s best professionals and bring some expert knowledge and good practices to the start-up”.

What is the problem the start-up is solving?

The founders of Legit Health and a selected group of key people within Almirall are coming together to tackle the problems that dermatologists and their patients experience, through mentoring sessions and coordinated efforts.

Clinicians often assume that they understand the experience of illness, but knowledge about medicine is not the same as understanding how it feels to be sick or to live with a chronic disease. Likewise, patients don’t tend to know how to communicate their symptoms and subjective experiences in a clinically-useful way. Therefore, doctors and patients have difficulties understanding each other. This results in a communication problem that generates large delays in diagnosis, reduces effectiveness of procedures and decreases health outcomes, among others.

That is why Legit Health joined Almirall’s Digital Garden and teamed up with experienced professionals such as Stacy Lockwood, Jacob González, Aurelie Scolan, Annabel Cercós, Teresa Melús, Almudena Galian or Sergio Velayos. Together, they have improved the product and gathered valuable feedback that will benefit both dermatologists and patients.

Who are the next-generation dermatologists?

The next-generation dermatologists who are using Legit.Health are professionals that care about maintaining a more effective communication with their patients. They want to make the patient feel understood and supported. And because they want to increase patients’ autonomy and control, they want their patients to be able to speak their language.

And above all, they are willing to advance the state of the art of Dermatology. They pursue objectivity, precision and reliability when reporting a pathology and want the best tool during the diagnosis of the disease.

How does Legit Health’s technology work?

By using algorithms that quantify induration, erythema, oozing and so on, Legit.Health’s tool estimates the severity of a pathology just by looking at pictures uploaded by the patients themselves. In this manner, the company has developed the ASCORAD (automatic SCORAD), the APASI (automatic PASI) and many more pioneering algorithms that bring more objectivity, reliability and, of course, agility to the process of reporting on a pathology. The tool also incorporates DLQI (Dermatology Life Quality Index) and many PROMs that speak about their inner state.

ASCORAD (Automatic SCOring of Atopic Dermatitis) uses six neural networks for the assessment of the severity of each visual sign.

Screen capture of a doctor using Legit.Health’s app to review a case sent by a patient.

This way, Legit.Health encourages patients to keep fighting against the disease. Thanks to communicating with their doctors through computer vision algorithms, patients get to feel that they control their psoriasis, not the other way around. They rule over their eczema, not the other way around.

This is a revolution in many ways. Legit.Health is reinventing communication between doctors and patients, by bringing asynchronous care that is immediate and responsive. Regardless of time and space, patients can report on their diseases right when they need it, and the algorithms make sure that the doctor gets the right information, in the right way and in the right time.

Let’s face it: psoriasis is tough. Acne is scarring. Skin diseases are hard to deal with and sometimes deadly. But we have no other option than to embrace the reality of the diseases and take control. That’s the task of the doctors of the future. They must shape the future of Dermatology by helping patients control their own pathologies and giving them power. That is Legit.Health’s mission: equip doctors and patients so they can fight bravely against the diseases. Get access to the tool.