County of San Mateo Works with Kinsa® to Strengthen Early Detection and Response Capabilities for Spreading Illness

Kinsa's predictive illness insights will further support the county's illness surveillance programs.

SAN FRANCISCO, March 28, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- In the wake of a severe illness season, Kinsa, an insights solutions business that uses data to predict, prepare for and prevent the spread of illness, today announced the County of San Mateo, California as a new customer of Kinsa's illness insights. San Mateo County marks the second public health customer of Kinsa's illness insights, after New York City. 

San Mateo County's Department of Public Health will distribute up to 1,500 Kinsa smart thermometers, at no cost, to families throughout the county, and will leverage Kinsa's proprietary illness forecast and real-time, geographically-precise illness insights to understand where and when fever and symptoms are spreading or projected to spread.

Kinsa's illness insights, which include prevalence of fever and symptoms, which geographies are being affected, and how quickly illness is spreading, have been shown to accurately forecast the spread of existing diseases like influenza weeks to months in advance, and predict the emergence of novel outbreaks like COVID-19 weeks before an outbreak occurs.

"As we saw with COVID, illness and its spread are notoriously difficult to predict. Local public health departments are faced with the tremendous challenge of keeping their residents well with little information on where symptoms are starting or how fast they're spreading," said Inder Singh, founder and CEO of Kinsa.  "An early warning system like Kinsa's is essential infrastructure to help identify hotspots of illness, deploy health resources to areas in need, target public health messaging for most impact and react to outbreaks early to contain the spread. I'm glad that San Mateo County will now have such a system to support their surveillance and response efforts."

About Kinsa

Kinsa is an insights solutions business using data and advanced analytics to track and forecast the spread of illness and predict corresponding demand for healthcare products and services. 

For products in highly volatile categories such as cough, cold, flu, nasal, allergy, Covid, and disinfectants, Kinsa helps brands and retailers:

• Reduce out-of-stocks
• Assess risk and plan more effectively
• Enhance marketing & media effectiveness to where and when people need their products

For hospitals, health systems and health insurers, Kinsa helps predict when & where to expect surges in hospitalizations or ED visits, and what to proactively message to keep high risk people healthy.

Kinsa aggregates data from more than 30 sources and, most importantly, collects the "missing ingredient" data from a proprietary network of millions of users to accurately detect and forecast spreading infectious illness. To capture hyperlocal illness data before someone ever visits the doctor or enters the healthcare system, Kinsa invented a new category of products — smart thermometers — that along with its medical guidance mobile apps and email / text alerts enables Kinsa to communicate with households at symptom onset.  Industry's use of these forecasts helps Kinsa achieve its mission of helping families and communities predict, prepare for, and prevent the spread of illness. 

Media Contact:

Kristen Marion 
623-308-2638 
[email protected]

SOURCE Kinsa