Arun Moorthy 

Age: 16

School: BASIS Scottsdale

Year: Junior

City: Scottsdale

The COVID-19 pandemic created a variety of hurdles. Anyone making a medical appointment in 2020 can remember, perhaps not fondly, of the routine list of questions from someone in their doctor’s office. Do you have a fever? Have you been exposed to anyone? On and on. While the questions were important for assessing risk and protecting a doctor and office staff from possible infection, they were logistically frustrating for both patient and physician.

Arun Moorthy saw an opportunity.

A junior at BASIS Scottsdale, Moorthy had an already established history of finding technological solutions for healthcare-related issues. He’d already co-founded a company, HealthAI Global, to build, market and improve healthcare-related apps. When Moorthy’s mother, a physician, began implementing the COVID screening procedures in her office, Moorthy knew he had a new project. 

Rather than have a staffer call and manually interview a patient over the phone, Moorthy created an online screening profiler that patients could fill out independently. Then, Moorthy began to iterate.

“Then over time with isolation because of COVID in general there was a spike of mental illness and depression,” Moorthy said. “One of the adjustments I made in the app was to add questions to the survey to look for depression as well.”

Now, 40 physicians use Moorthy’s COVID-19 Risk Profiler. He’s estimated that by shifting patients to the app instead of phone screening, the app has saved 93 business days in staff time. 

Moorthy now wants to take the back end of the COVID-19 Risk Profiler and adapt it for other purposes – expanding its reach, making it smarter, and helping more people. 

“I want to make the collection of apps more open-source and available,” Moorthy said. “That relates a lot to marketing. If people can see the idea, it can spark ideas for them to improve it.”