When Ada Health was founded nine years ago, hardly anyone was talking about combining artificial intelligence and physician care -- outside of a handful of futurists. But the chatbot boom gave way to a powerful combination of AI-augmented health care which others, like Babylon Health in 2013 and KRY in 2015, also capitalized on. The journey Ada was about to take was not an obvious one, so I spoke to Dr. Claire Novorol, Ada's co-founder and chief medical officer, at the Slush conference last year to unpack their process and strategy. Co-founded with Daniel Nathrath and Dr. Martin Hirsch, the startup initially set out to be an assistant to doctors rather than something that would have a consumer interface. At the beginning, Novorol said they did not talk about what they were building as an AI so much as it was pure machine learning. Years later, Ada is a free app, and just like the average chatbot, it asks a series of questions and employs an algorithm to make an initial health assessment.

Ada Health's combination of artificial intelligence and human doctors has made it a rising star in the emerging medical chatbot space. But the road to AI-augmented health care has been long and winding. "Eight years ago, when we started this company, nobody was talking about AI," said Dr. Claire Novorol, cofounder and chief medical officer at Berlin-based Ada. "We did not describe what we were doing as AI, even though it is a form of AI. We talked about medical reasoning. And so we were really building a system, an enormous medical knowledge base, and our reasoning engine that could support doctors in their decision-making."

As pressures on healthcare systems intensify, an increasing number of consumers are turning to the use of symptom checkers in the search for fast answers – or guidance – to any concerns that they may have. But although these tools have become popular, questions around their accuracy, and not only, are plaguing the digital health space. Last week, at Slush, Ada Health cofounder and chief medical officer Claire Novorol spoke to Wired UK's Victoria Turk about the Berlin-headquartered company's approach to building trust in its AI-powered chatbot. "Absolutely key, first of all, is the quality of the product," Novorol told the audience. "So what we've always focused on from the very beginning, eight years ago now actually, is the quality of the core product, the foundation of everything that we do, and that's our knowledge base, our reasoning engine, and how it works, the clinical quality of that, accuracy, safety."