Proto Company 07 is a processing layer for health programmes: any stream of field data in — dashboards, decisions and daily work out. It connects screening to the end of the care pathway and enables every health worker along the way. Below, the idea is rendered on TB — where our market-shaping expert has convinced grant providers and ministries to get the screening cost down to 1¢ per person through pay-per-use licenses.
Screening and diagnostic inputs flow in from the field — X-rays from community and hospital-based screening, symptom forms, lab results. One engine interprets them, with one job: screening and identifying patients. Administrators get the dashboard view — a real-time picture of hotspots and coverage. Community health workers get guided pathways in the chat they already use — trained, incentivised, and recording back so the system stays current. Swap the configuration and the same engine serves another ministry.
Present this ⤢Same engine underneath. A vertical is a configuration file — screening rules, patient sequence, dashboards, incentives — not a rebuild. What you see below is the TB pack running.
A chest X-ray on an existing machine is read by AI in seconds — a triaging tool, not a diagnosis. The instant someone screens positive for TB risk, the system takes over the hand-offs that usually leak: alerting the health worker on WhatsApp, nudging and booking the confirmatory molecular test (which also checks for drug resistance), enrolling treatment, screening the household, and logging everything to the national register.
Present this ⤢At the moment, most grant & country efforts go toward procuring technology that gives deterministic pathways like more efficient ways to identify positive patients.
We're proposing far more efficient costing models, so the focus moves to where it should be: eradicating TB, treating one patient at a time.
The moment a scan is positive, a notification reaches the health worker who covers that household — on WhatsApp, the tool they already use every day. No new app, and no chatbot: just standard WhatsApp Business template messages with tap-to-reply buttons. The worker taps; the system files the paperwork. Every branch is a pre-approved protocol — including the hard moments, like a family hesitant over stigma, which triggers the standard counselling audio and a supervisor notification.
Present this ⤢Why this matters: the cascade normally leaks at every hand-off — referral lost, patient never tested, treatment never started. Here the referral, lab order, result sync, treatment enrolment, register entry and household scheduling all file automatically off the worker's button taps. The health worker does the human part — showing up, building trust, dispelling fear — and never touches a form.
Deliberately boring technology: everything shown is standard WhatsApp Business — template messages, quick-reply buttons, media messages. Pre-approved protocol branches, not an AI chat. That's what makes it deployable inside a ministry's existing approval processes, and usable by workers with no training curve.
Why WhatsApp — and what else? The principle: deploy on whatever tools and apps the frontline already uses — the smaller the adoption curve, the better. The pathway is channel-agnostic; WhatsApp happens to be where most workers already are, and it's also the trickiest channel, being a private provider whose Business Platform charges per conversation (a fraction of a cent to a few cents by country — costed into the per-patient price). The alternatives — SMS/USSD, Telegram, a ministry's existing CHW app — are the easier integrations.
Every scan, confirmation and treatment start writes to the national register in real time. Administrators get a live picture of coverage, caseload and cascade completion — and, crucially, where to send the next health worker or mobile X-ray unit.
Present this ⤢We make the cost of screening negligible. The AI reads on the X-ray systems a country already owns — or on new devices where none exist — through one seamless setup, and the license is priced per use, running online or offline. So the marginal cost of screening one more person approaches a penny. The play: reduce the cost of what the programme already spends on, redirect that funding down the cascade, and show the results.
Present the calculator ⤢No per-machine license to renew, and no fleet to buy unless a district needs one. The setup plugs into existing digital X-ray systems — or new devices — seamlessly, and each site chooses its mode: online where there's connectivity, offline on a small edge box where there isn't, syncing when the link returns. Countries pay only for scans actually read.