JONAS
A Vaccine Concerns Assessment Tool
Our Mission
To combat vaccine hesitancy and misinformation
Context
According to the World Health Organization, vaccines can prevent 2-3 million deaths per year (1), but vaccine hesitancy is increasing, with 2 out of 5 Americans adults reporting doubts over vaccine safety (2). With increased vaccine hesitancy, vaccine coverage decreases, making outbreaks more likely if coverage is less than 95%. Vaccines save lives, but vaccine hesitancy puts lives at risk.
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Known
Challenges
As the first line of contact with patients, doctors need help in identifying vaccine hesitant patients. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, doctors are often unable to discuss vaccine concerns with patients in a thorough manner.
Moreover, most vaccine hesitancy assessments used in clinics are often long and cumbersome, only adding on to the piles of paperwork for the patient. Even if administered, such surveys are often qualitative and incredibly lengthy (up to 8 pages long!)--often requiring the need of manual assessment of extra staff (3).
Thus, there is a need for a solution to help facilitate the dialogue between the patient and doctor, while also allowing for easy integration into existing healthcare workflows.
Enter Jonas--a vaccine concerns assessment survey bot that identifies vaccine hesitancy reasons while keeping the survey experience short and user-friendly.
Tech and Impact
With just five simple questions, Jonas assesses and classifies vaccine hesitancy reasons from the patient’s responses, populating results into a dashboard for doctors to review and utilize while engaging in better dialogue with patients (4).
Trained on vaccine-related tweets from Twitter and self-collected surveys via Qualtrics, Jonas (5) employs XLNet--the language model developed by Carnegie Mellon University and Google AI Brain. Having outperformed BERT in 20 tasks (6), XLNet assists Jonas in detecting up to 9 vaccine hesitancy concerns from only five simple survey questions. We are also proud to mention that Jonas has demonstrated 90% accuracy on a test set sample of mixed vaccine hesitancy responses.
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Interested in speaking with Jonas? View our demo, or contact us!
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(1) https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/immunization-coverage
(3) There are many surveys administered by the CDC, but examples of the National Immunization Surveys (NIS) can be viewed here: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/imz-managers/nis/datasets-teen.html
(4) Our survey questions were inspired by the SAGE Working Group on Vaccine Hesitancy's questionnaire: https://www.who.int/immunization/sage/meetings/2013/april/4_survey_questionsRevised.pdf
(5) Fun Fact: We took naming inspiration from Jonas Salk, who developed one of the first successful polio vaccines.
(6) https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.08237