AI StewardIQ - Pediatric Antimicrobial Stewardship & Point-of-Care Diagnostic Support

AI StewardIQ is a point-of-care diagnostic decision support platform built for primary care clinics anywhere in the world that see febrile children but lack an on-site lab. Antimicrobial resistance is not a wealthy-country problem — it is a global emergency, and it hits low- and middle-income countries hardest. StewardIQ exists to attack the single biggest driver of that crisis: clinicians prescribing antibiotics "just in case" because they have no fast way to tell a bacterial infection from a viral one.

The Problem:

The Solution:

StewardIQ runs on a tablet at the point of care and works offline-first, syncing whenever a connection is available rather than requiring one. During a consultation it combines a structured symptom checklist with simple bedside inputs — pulse oximetry, a rapid CRP test to flag likely bacterial versus viral illness, and (for infants) hemoglobin — into a single recommendation with the reasoning shown alongside it, not just a score. The clinician can always override it; the tool is designed to support the decision, never make it unilaterally. Before a clinic's antibiotic guidance changes, StewardIQ runs through a local adaptation pass against that country's or region's national antibiotic guidelines and resistance surveillance data, because a formulary that's correct in one country can be wrong in the next. Aggregated, de-identified prescribing data rolls up into a district or national dashboard compatible with WHO's global antimicrobial resistance surveillance reporting, so a ministry of health can see stewardship trends across every clinic running it, not just one.

Use Cases:

Usage Example:

A district medical officer oversees 24 rural health centers where nearly three in four children with fever were leaving with an antibiotic prescription, most of the time for what was actually a viral illness — the clinics simply had no way to tell the difference at the bedside. After piloting StewardIQ in four centers, with the antibiotic guidance recalibrated against the country's own national formulary and resistance data before rollout, prescribing for uncomplicated febrile illness dropped by roughly half, while children recovered at the same rate as before — clinicians were simply no longer guessing. The offline-first design meant the two centers with unreliable power and no internet for most of the day kept working exactly the same as the ones with a stable connection, syncing data automatically whenever a signal returned. The full district rollout now feeds a shared dashboard the ministry uses to track stewardship progress center by center.

Target AI Niche (Global Health 2026): Antimicrobial resistance is one of the WHO's top global health threats, and a $60M joint initiative from the Gates Foundation, Novo Nordisk Foundation, and Wellcome is now funding locally-led evaluation of exactly this category of AI health tool across low- and middle-income countries — stewardship and point-of-care diagnostics built for local health systems, not adapted from wealthy-country EHR data, are where global funding and demand are converging in 2026.

Technical Stack: React Native (offline-first, local SQLite store with background sync), Bluetooth integration for pulse oximeter and rapid diagnostic readers, Node.js/PostgreSQL sync backend, rules engine plus calibrated risk scoring per deployment region, WHO GLASS-compatible surveillance data export, end-to-end encryption for patient data in transit and at rest.