A Bilbao-based company founded in 2020 has developed medical software that helps dermatologists diagnose and assess the severity of skin diseases more accurately. Its founder tells Euronews how it works and why it is particularly useful in complex cases.
The origins of Legit.Health lie not in market analysis, assessing the viability of a project or studying competitors, but in personal experience. Company co-founder Andy Aguilar told Euronews that from a young age she felt that something was wrong with her skin. When she began seeking medical help, she went through a journey that, according to her, many dermatology patients will recognize: going from one specialist to another, accumulating misdiagnoses and waiting between appointments while symptoms progressed.
This experience led to an understanding of the problem that eventually shaped a company using artificial intelligence to diagnose diseases. According to Andy Aguilar, dermatology already has a substantial body of clinical knowledge, and it is of a very high standard.
However, access to the information on which decisions are based remains a weak point: a skin lesion is described in words in a medical report, assessments of psoriasis severity can vary between specialists, and a photograph taken during one appointment is not always comparable with one taken at a previous visit.
Euronews spoke with Andy Aguilar, the project’s co-founder, who has been included in Forbes’ list of the top 100 most creative people, as well as in the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
Legit.Health was founded in Bilbao in 2020, and from the outset the company made a decision that would shape its subsequent development: to create a medical product that would be regulated and validated in cooperation with hospitals, rather than a mass-market consumer app. According to its founder, this is the slowest and most expensive route, but at the same time the only one that allows the product to be used directly in doctors’ offices.
Legit.Health is medical software that requires no additional equipment or specialized cameras: it works on a mobile phone or on devices that are already available at a healthcare facility. The system integrates with the electronic health record used by a hospital or clinic, so doctors do not need to open a separate app or change their usual workflow.
But how exactly does it work? A photograph of the skin problem is taken with any smartphone, and within seconds, clinical information appears on the same screen.
The system’s first function is to support doctors in making a diagnosis. Here, the developers made a deliberate design choice: the system does not provide a definitive verdict, but instead offers a prioritized differential diagnosis, assigns probabilities across categories of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11), and highlights directly on the image what it “looked at” to reach its conclusion.
The second function is the objective assessment of disease severity. The system counts and measures clinical signs such as erythema, scaling, induration, pustules, nodules and blisters — almost 40 different signs in total — and uses them to automatically calculate severity scores already used in dermatology, such as PASI for psoriasis, SCORAD for atopic dermatitis and IHS4 for hidradenitis suppurativa. This turns disease severity into a reproducible numerical value that makes it possible to track changes in an individual patient or compare assessments made by different specialists.
According to company data, the accuracy of doctors’ diagnostic decisions increases by 15–21 percentage points when the tool is used, depending on the working conditions. In primary care, a controlled study showed an improvement of more than 18 percentage points, from 63.7% to 81.9%.
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