JONAS: A Vaccine Concerns Assessment Tool

According to the World Health Organization, vaccines can prevent 2–3 million deaths per year, but vaccine hesitancy is increasing, with 2 out of 5 Americans adults reporting doubts over vaccine safety. With increased vaccine hesitancy, vaccine coverage decreases, making outbreaks more likely if coverage is less than 95%. Vaccines save lives, but vaccine hesitancy puts lives at risk. Our mission is to combat vaccine hesitancy and misinformation.

JONAS: A Vaccine Concerns Assessment Tool is focused on reducing vaccine hesitancy by helping facilitate better dialogue between patients and doctors. Using a combination of text from Twitter and self-collected surveys that were labeled with vaccine hesitancy reasons, we are applying XLNet, Salesforce, Flow XO, and data engineering for our MVP to create product modules for both patients and doctors; we intend to use our MVP to contribute to peer and industry learning about utilizing bots and NLP in healthcare settings to improve patient engagement and reduce vaccine hesitancy.