Who We Are & What We Are Building

At Docokids, we believe that every child deserves access to high-quality healthcare, no matter where they live. Our startup founded by pediatricians provides 24/7 pediatric guidance through WhatsApp, making expert medical advice accessible to families in Colombia and across Latin America. We are generating our artificial intelligence (AI) model for fever management to improve pediatric healthcare access, reduce emergency room overcrowding, and empower caregivers with reliable medical guidance. By developing AI with pediatric expertise from our founding team, our model will autonomously handle frequent fever-related caregiver inquiries while enabling pediatricians to focus on more complex pediatric cases.

Making It Simple: How Our Solution Works

Imagine being a parent in a rural area without a nearby pediatrician. Your child develops a fever in the middle of the night. Instead of panicking, you send a WhatsApp message to Docokids, where our AI model and real pediatricians work together to provide instant guidance. Our technology helps you decide whether to visit a doctor, explain symptoms, dispel myths, and ensure timely intervention when needed. This model is being created by pediatricians and experts in AI with the input of users. 

The Social Issue We Are Addressing

In Colombia and many parts of Latin America, millions of families lack timely access to pediatric care due to financial, geographical, or systemic barriers. Many parents end up rushing to emergency rooms for non-urgent issues, leading to overcrowding and unnecessary healthcare costs. Others, especially those in rural areas, have no pediatricians available at all. Our solution helps bridge this gap in a realistic and usable solution by providing instant, expert-backed medical advice at a fraction of the cost of traditional consultations.

Why AI & Data Science?

AI enables us to scale our impact in ways that traditional healthcare cannot. By utilizing AI and data science we currently can and will:

• Summarize conversations to reduce pediatricians’ workload and make healthcare responses more efficient.
• Identify patterns in symptoms and medical concerns to flag high-risk cases.
• With a large volume of conversations, we can generate public health insights to help organizations and governments improve healthcare planning.
• Translate and adapt responses to fit different linguistic and cultural contexts.
• Guide families at low cost with frequent questions integrating flows to real pediatricians. 

What Makes Our Solution Unique?

Unlike other pediatric chat services, Docokids is not just an AI chatbot. We combine real pediatricians with AI-powered assistance to ensure every family receives personalized, reliable, and contextually relevant advice. Our approach also prioritizes low-data usage and accessibility, making it ideal for populations with limited internet access. Above all, it is being created with the input of families, supervision of peditricians and by experts in the AI field which creates a unique model that is usable. 

Why Open Source Matters

By making our AI-powered system open source, we ensure:

• Transparency in how pediatric healthcare recommendations are generated.
• Collaboration with researchers, universities, and health organizations to improve the technology.
• Scalability so that other healthcare providers can adapt our solution to their regions.

How Docokids Was Born

Our founders, Valentina Ríos and Natalia Cano, saw first-hand the gaps in pediatric healthcare access while working with families in underserved communities. Inspired by parents' struggles to get timely, reliable advice, Docokids was created to bring expert pediatric care to every family, regardless of location. We started with a simple website and an onsite chat, and we are now managing between 7,000 and 8,000 conversations monthly, where 81% of these conversations are with users in Colombia and our remaining users from many other countries. 

Meet Our Team

Our multidisciplinary team includes pediatricians, AI specialists, software engineers, and health experts across Latin America. Our pediatricians span different regions of Colombia, ensuring cultural and linguistic inclusivity. We also collaborate with community health workers, companies with rural presence, and NGOs to better serve vulnerable populations.

Why Diversity Is Our Strength

Healthcare is not one-size-fits-all. Having a diverse team in backgrounds, gender, and rurality, allows us to understand different cultural perspectives, adapt medical guidance, and build solutions that truly work for all families. Diversity also fosters innovation and empathy, which we at Docokids believe are crucial in designing AI-powered healthcare solutions that are usable.

How UNICEF’s Venture Fund Will Help Us Scale

With UNICEF’s Venture Fund investment, we plan to:

• Enhance AI capabilities to improve triage accuracy and response times.
• Develop a pediatric health insights dashboard to help governments and NGOs better plan health interventions.
• Expand access to underserved regions, including Chocó, Guajira, Amazonas, and Vaupés.
• Optimize WhatsApp and AI integrations to handle more users efficiently.

It will not only strengthen our technology but also position us for larger-scale investments to expand across Latin America.

Our First 100 Days

We have hired and onboarded our first AI Engineer, Alejandro Gómez, who brings valuable. experiences from call centers and expertise in software development, making him a great fit for our UNICEF project. 

In early March, we visited three indigenous communities, Cabritos, Ciruelacat, and Urrichicat, in La Guajira, northern Colombia, to better understand their needs as we develop our solution. These visits were made possible with our partners, Hilo Sagrado and Delzur, nonprofits that work with these communities on economic opportunities and empowerment. We are developing our solution with our users in mind, ensuring it is not created in isolation so that we can truly harness the power of digital health to improve pediatric care in underserved areas. 

We have laid the groundwork for future open-sourcing by identifying dependencies and ensuring the protection of our users' data by anonymizing any potentially personally identifiable or sensitive information. This is crucial for enabling the open source community to repurpose our Fever Module for their own needs in the future. 

Join Us in Revolutionizing Pediatric Care

We are excited to embark on this journey with UNICEF’s Venture Fund and partners who believe in using AI for social good. If you are passionate about leveraging technology to improve children's healthcare, join us in making pediatric guidance accessible for every family.

Follow our journey on Linkedin, Instagram and other social media platforms. 

• LinkedIn
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