Submitted via IRC for AnonymousLuser
Anthem thinks its 'virtuous cycle' with Doc.ai can improve patient care
Last August, major insurer Anthem announced a 12-month trial with startup Doc.ai to see if artificial intelligence could find patterns in people’s experience of allergies. With the trial coming to its scheduled completion, Anthem describes the partnership as a “virtuous cycle” that lets the insurer benefit from data and insights it couldn’t acquire on its own.
“We are sitting on this amazing data set that we are allowed to use for doing process improvements to health care, but which will be very restricted,” said Ted Goldstein, chief artificial intelligence officer for Anthem AI, at Transform 2019.
An AI-driven startup has more leeway than a traditional medical company would. “But a startup company, of course, can give the apps out to the world and collect data ... they can develop hypotheses there, which we can then look and observe to see in our data set,” he said.
Doc.ai aims to let users manage their own health data, which it says is stored locally on users’ devices to prevent hacking. The company has also enrolled interested users in studies on Crohn’s disease and colitis.
“We’re doing this because we have not yet had the opportunity to collect all that real data in one place to try to understand how [it] connects,” Doc.ai cofounder and COO Sam De Brouwer said of her company’s mission.
She said even small amounts of data can help predict a user’s future health. “It is possible already in health care, just based on your age and sex, to give you some level of predictions about health risks and other things,” she said.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Wednesday July 17 2019, @01:36PM (4 children)
Riiight. This sounds more like yet another way to sell cell phones and mine user data for $$$.
So in other words, eventually a magic "AI" programmed for optimal money extraction will jack up your rates for no explicable reason and you won't be able to do anything about it because new high tech is always right.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by ikanreed on Wednesday July 17 2019, @03:59PM (3 children)
It's amazing how everyone in technology has turned against the tech sector's behavior. Even the fucking banks didn't manage to alienate all of their employees.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 17 2019, @05:24PM
The "tech sector" as in the actions of the employees, or the "tech sector" as in the managers and investors constantly trying to fuck us out of our privacy and grub a little more profit out of us? Because the latter happens far more often than coming up with technological innovation that actually improves people's lives IMVHO.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday July 17 2019, @06:38PM (1 child)
When you know how the sausage is made...
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday July 17 2019, @06:41PM
Nah, fucking everyone hates silicon valley except the government and investors now.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 17 2019, @04:11PM
Which actually means "Raise the insurance rates for those people and increase the drug prices that they need for more profit".
(Score: 3, Interesting) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday July 17 2019, @06:46PM
Data analysis can lead to better healthcare outcomes. But since you know that data will be abused for marketing and insurance purposes; it leads to better financial outcomes to not allow the healthcare companies (and therefore the insurers) to have this data.
If HIPAA had any teeth, it could make sure that healthcare providers don't just send this stuff off to insures or marketers or whomever. But hospitals just love dumping their full database to anyone that requests it and is willing to pay for it; as long as the receiver pinky-swears to abide by HIPAA.
I work in an industry that is supposed to receive anonymized data from hospitals. The hospitals can't be arsed to blank out names and other PHI from their data, so they just send us a raw feed. All we have to do is swear not to abuse it. (And the first thing we do is delete the offending data, because I sure as hell don't want to be stuck holding that ball.)
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh