Fighting misinformation in the age of COVID-19: the mission of epidemiologist Lina Forcier

Every day, more than 200 new health applications and 4,000 scientific articles are published on the Web. Combine this with the 150 million online searches carried out daily on this type of information, and you have endless possibilities of stumbling across false or erroneous information.

In a context where false information can hamper the colossal efforts being made to combat the pandemic, some entrepreneurs have decided to create solutions to combat misinformation about the COVID-19 virus. Such is the case of Lina Forcier and her team, with Factually Health.

Lina Forcier, an epidemiologist by trade and at heart, has always been concerned about misinformation about health online. She says: “You can find all sorts of things on the Web, some of them quite outrageous. It was when anxious people around me approached me after consulting bad information online or being misdiagnosed, that I said to myself that I had to intervene.” It’s worth noting that, combined, fake news about health, politics and finance costs the global economy $78 billion a year.

That’s why the epidemiologist put on her entrepreneurial hat and founded Factually Health in 2018. Using artificial intelligence, the startup assigns a credibility score to all online health information, and is thus able to provide individuals or organizations wishing to do so with expert, advanced research according to very specific categories (for example: medical guidelines).

As the amount of information available online is exponential, Lina and her team decided to focus their artificial intelligence on a specific disease: breast cancer. “Once an artificial intelligence tool has been developed for one disease, it is easily transferable to other cancers or even multiple sclerosis. But we need to validate it first,” explains Lina.

An information portal at the service of public health
Factually Health was originally developed to cover information around breast cancer, but in the face of the current health crisis, the team has pivoted to offer free access to an information portal on COVID-19. Lina explains: “We couldn’t have carried on without worrying about what was happening with COVID-19. We had to do it, not only for the survival of the company, but above all we had to make our expertise useful in the fight against this pandemic.” What’s more, she tells me that according to a scientific study, the more fake news circulates online, the less the population follows health and government recommendations, and the more the pandemic gains ground.

The idea behind this portal, created by Lina and Lucas Nogueira, CTO of Factually Health and also holder of a Master Management Innovation and Big Data degree, is to provide access to credible content on the virus, the disease and everything that surrounds it.

Information is made available through various sections, including:
– Debunking myths about the coronavirus (“Is it true that washing your hands doesn’t work against COVID-19?”);
– Track the evolution of the pandemic via a map and figures;
– Resources needed and available in several countries;
– Health authorities around the world.

Lina Forcier’s goal is not limited to Quebec, but to extend the portal not only across Canada, but also to the United States, the country most affected by the pandemic to date. She explains why: “The public is beginning to understand that public health is shared around the world. We can no longer have such isolated systems. On the contrary, they need to be broader.”

Preventing other illnesses through crisis
As for the future, Lina, like many other entrepreneurs, sees the crisis as a way of reinventing herself and helping companies get back on their feet: “It’s up to us to get back on board and find a unique product that will help companies come back big.”

The next step? Creating other IT portals like this one, but for other diseases such as breast cancer, a disease already studied by Lina and her team. A great way to democratize public access to credible online health content. But it’s also a great way of continuing the fight against misinformation and for the prevention of certain diseases.