Piction Health is an online, expert dermatology practice, incorporating AI and computer vision to streamline care, with the aim to ensure every person with skin issues can get the expert care they need.
Approximately 2.3B people globally suffer from skin disease afflictions, ranging from malignant melanomas to debilitating inflammatory conditions like psoriasis and eczema. Approximately two-thirds of cases seen by non-specialized healthcare providers who misdiagnose 50% of these conditions. Piction Health was founded in 2017 by a three-time melanoma survivor to address this problem. The company’s mission is to enable anyone to access expert care when they need it. They do this by enabling their clinical team to quickly identify and triage dermatological maladies with the equivalent or superior accuracy to a top-tier dermatologist. Piction offers an integrated end-to-end service that allows patients to take a photo of a skin condition, and the condition is identified and triaged using an AI-based classification analysis which can then support the right provider to provide the right care at the right time.
The Piction Health patient experience begins with a mobile app, and the patient is guided in how to take high quality photos and answer other standard questions clinicians need to address their cases. The case is then reviewed by a board-certified dermatologist who evaluates the patient and provides guidance, including calling in prescriptions.
Piction can streamline care because of a robust and highly accurate classification machine learning model for skin disease identification. Given the current state of the art of commercially viable systems, this required them to accumulate a large data set of labeled, clinical images representative of a variety of skin diseases and skin tones. The team estimates with automation and AI support, dermatologists can manage up to 15X more cases than they could otherwise manage, bringing scalability to an industry with very limited trained clinicians.
We believe there is a significant opportunity for the applied use of AI to support care for patients with skin disease. And we believe Susan’s personal story is the type of “founder drive” required to achieve this ambitious goal.
There is a scarcity of dermatologists and those experts are not distributed geographically to provide adequate patient coverage throughout the US or the world. Coming out of the COVID pandemic, healthcare systems are continuing to leverage telemedicine solutions, of which Piction Health's approach could be an ideal fit. Therefore the global healthcare system can be dramatically improved with AI-powered supportive clinical aids that enable healthcare providers to more reliably triage and manage skin conditions.