Cutting-edge research: Symptoma is nominated for the Houska Prize 2021

With a total endowment of 500,000 euros, the Houska Prize is the largest private prize for applied research in Austria. The golden trophy is now being awarded for the 16th time. Symptoma is nominated as one of the five best projects in the category "Research and Development in SMEs".

Symptoma stood out from a total of 61 submissions: The expert committees nominated Symptoma as one of five candidates for the Austrian "Research Oscar". Every year, the Houska Prize by the B&C Private Foundation honors the most innovative research projects in Austria. In a two-stage process, the five best projects in each of the two categories "University Research" and "Research & Development in SMEs" are selected. The winning projects can look forward to a prize money of 150,000 euros each, while the runners-up receive 60,000 euros. The third place is worth 20,000 euros and is determined by a public vote. All other nominees receive 10,000 euros. The winners will be honored on September 23, 2021.

With the Houska Prize, the B&C Private Foundation recognizes outstanding domestic research achievements. Innovative projects like Symptoma’s demonstrate once again that Austria is a country of researchers. With a total endowment of 500,000 euros, the foundation wants to improve the financial framework for innovations in Austria – and enable top research and innovative projects in the future, especially for small and medium-sized companies.

Among submissions from Lower Austria, Styria, Tyrol, and Vienna, Symptoma convinced the jury. The digital health assistant sets new standards in the field of digital healthcare: Symptoma's eHealth solution is based on a constantly expanding database, including medical literature from all medical fields as well as clinical case descriptions of various diseases. Misdiagnoses still represent a "blind spot" in medicine and cost lives year after year. The SME Symptoma, founded in 2006, tackles this problem at its root. Patients and doctors enter symptoms into the chatbot, answer questions and receive a list of possible causes - sorted by probability. The artificial intelligence can not only correctly classify "typical" clinical pictures, but also supports the identification of very rare diseases. The innovation is based on 15 years of research and development by physicians and data scientists. The high accuracy of over 96 percent has been demonstrated and published in internal, external, and scientifically verified studies, including by Pfizer and Nature. Ten million people use the symptom checker every month. Last but not least, the pandemic showed how digital solutions such as Symptoma can revolutionize the healthcare system in the long term.

Symptoma has also been providing support in the fight against COVID-19 since 2020: the chatbot complements the City of Vienna’s health hotline and ensures that limited resources such as PCR tests are spent in a prioritized manner. In addition, new data on previously unidentified signs of COVID-19 enable a better understanding of the new disease and thus better patient care. Symptoma was even able to make reliable predictions about the pandemic course in the respective region five days in advance, from which appropriate recommendations for action could be derived. However, privacy is also very important: the company does not place any cookies, does not ask for names or email addresses, and anonymizes the IP addresses of the users. Personal data is therefore used exclusively for symptom testing. “Digital medicine and artificial intelligence pose the scientific basis for precision medicine. It is therefore essential to enable patients to live a long and healthy life while at the same time protecting their privacy," says Jama Nateqi, medical doctor, founder, and CEO of Symptoma.

Since the B&C Private Foundation was founded in 2000, it has been its goal to promote Austrian entrepreneurship – for instance by investing in Austrian industrial and technology companies via their holding companies. The foundation also supports numerous projects and initiatives to improve Austria as a business location. The Houska Prize is one of these initiatives, as are endowed professorships, the Vienna Business Law Day, the Initiative for Innovation and Location Research, the MEGA Educational Foundation, and the Foundation for Economic Education.

Read the full press release about the projects nominated for the Houska Prize here.

Image: Wilke