- Charles Hoskinson, the founder of Cardano, has slammed the US healthcare system, describing it as “fucked” and alleging it functions primarily to make profits at the expense of patient outcomes.
- Hoskinson is working to create an alternative system, plowing US$200 million (AU$303m) of his own money into a healthcare centre in Wyoming that will leverage AI and blockchain tech.
- Once fully developed Hoskinson said he’d make the tech stack open source, allowing other healthcare centres to implement similar systems.
Cardano founder, Charles Hoskinson, is on a mission to reshape America’s healthcare system, leveraging emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain to improve patient care.
Speaking to CoinDesk in an interview at the Rare Evo Conference in Las Vegas, Hoskinson argued that the US healthcare system isn’t really broken as such, rather it’s working exactly as intended. The problem, according to Hoskinson, is that the system is intended to make healthcare companies huge profits and keep patients sick as long as possible.
Healthcare is just fucked in America. It’s just fucked. Everybody knows it’s true. Yet they all try to continue making the system go because it’s just too profitable.
Charles Hoskinson, Cardano founderIn an effort to create a new model of healthcare in the US, Hoskinson has committed around US$200 million (AU$303m) of his own money to establish a cutting-edge medical centre, known as the Hoskinson Health and Wellness Clinic, in the town of Gillette, Wyoming.
Hoskinson said his healthcare centre would have something like a pay-what-you-can model, describing its ethos as “if they [patients] can’t pay, don’t charge ’em.”
The Cardano founder also said the existing healthcare model in the US is rife with bad incentives, resulting in huge corporate profits but terrible patient outcomes.
“All the financial incentives are just horrible and wrong inside healthcare,” he said. He added, “they have every incentive to keep you as sick as possible for as long as possible, because they’ve developed chronic treatments for all those things.”
You may be wondering why Hoskinson is interested in this problem: shouldn’t he be busy solving trilemmas or something? Well, it turns out his family has a long and proud history of providing healthcare — his grandfather, father, uncle and brother have all been medical doctors.
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Hoskinson’s Solution to Bad Healthcare in the US
Hoskinson believes healthcare has become too bureaucratic, profit-driven and focussed on billing codes rather than patients. He claims his new system would be patient-focussed and low cost — a vision he believes new technologies like AI can help achieve.
Let’s build a clinic where we put the patient at the center. We build care teams, we use AI and we do everything in our power to try to just make it patient-centered care that’s affordable.
Charles Hoskinson, Cardano founderHoskinson’s system would aim to empower doctors to use AI to get up-to-date medical information across all medical specialties.
“Every day it can rag in the totality of all medical knowledge, and you can have agents representing each specialty of medicine… and give an updated care plan at the beginning of the day to the provider.”
The Cardano founder also suggested AI could be used to enhance diagnosis, trawling through past test data to unearth “subtle cues in the patient history” which might help improve diagnostic speed and accuracy.
As for blockchain, Hoskinson said technologies like zero-knowledge proofs might prove useful for record keeping and verifying specific patient data, such as age or citizenship status, without revealing any private medical information.
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Once this medical tech stack is fully developed, Hoskinson said it’ll be open-sourced and freely available to other medical centres wanting to implement similar systems.
“We’re not here to make money off of [it],” he said. “The goal is to open source them, open source the software, you know, get that care system out there.”
Hoskinson said he believes the existing US healthcare system doesn’t want to see new systems emerge, claiming the local hospital in Gillette is “trying to kill” his new medical centre. He also alleged that foreign doctors working in his facility are facing delays of up to 12 months in getting their credentials recognised and approved by health authorities.
Despite these obstacles, Hoskinson said he’s determined to reshape the US healthcare system.
I put $200 million of my own money into my clinic and we’ve been building for the last three years, and I legitimately wanna solve this problem. I think it’s my legacy and it’s the family’s legacy and it’s also the single most important thing in America.
Charles Hoskinson, Cardano founderCredit: Source link
