August 2019 // Read our company story to discover how we aim to help psychiatrists get matched with the most effective antidepressant to enhance care.
Prescribing the right anti-depression treatment often involves a long trial and error process. Your psychiatrist suggests one type of treatment, but it doesn’t work or has too many adverse effects. Patients then go through a long period of trialing different treatments, yet the depression symptoms, often debilitating, may continue.
Speaking with ISRAEL21c, a leading American online magazine focused on technological and scientific advances made by researchers in Israel, Taliaz CEO, Dekel Taliaz shares his story on why he founded Taliaz with his brother, Oren.
The brothers set up the company, after their surname – Taliaz – harnessing artificial intelligence and machine learning to enable psychiatrists to prescribe the right antidepressant, the first time.
The company’s technology is based on proprietary algorithms that can predict the efficacy (as well as any adverse effects) of current antidepressants with high accuracy when given a series of inputs. These inputs include DNA swabs for genetic data; a detailed mental-health history; information on the patient’s environment and his or her demographic background; and any already existing clinical data from the patient’s electronic medical record (EMR),
Taliaz’s PREDICTIX products, Digital and Genetics, compare the data it collects from patients with records from the US National Institutes of Health. While the NIH database has information from thousands of patients, the Holy Grail of data is closer to home.
Moshe Bar Siman Tov, director-general of the Israel Ministry of Health, says Israel’s four HMOs and their affiliated hospitals have used the same EMR platform for the past two decades. With 98% of the country’s population covered by full health insurance, Predictix can potentially improve its AI by utilizing nine million additional records.
Taliaz is already testing its solution with a limited number of psychiatrists in Israel’s Maccabi HMO.