Can the Blockchain and AI Technologies Solve the Healthcare Crisis? | HuffPost

Whether or not you are someone who would be in favor of it, you have got to admit that one thing is true – healthcare reform is probably not going to happen in the US anytime soon.

While our Canadian neighbors to the north and our European friends on the other side of the Atlantic enjoy universally accessible and affordable medical care, millions of Americans are being left with nowhere to turn when they eventually fall into dire straits.

According to statistics from the Center for Disease Control (CDC), nearly 5 percent of all American patients failed to obtain medical care due to cost last year. This means that for every twenty Americans that entered a hospital, one person was turned away due to lack of funds.

While some may continue to rally for some kind of reform under the Trump administration (yeah right…), others have chosen to take a more realistic approach. Across the country, attempts are being made to circumvent America’s broken healthcare system, and get healthcare to those people who need it most. Many are turning to technological innovation to do this.

Is technology the answer?

In today’s digitizing world, technology is progressing fast, and our lives are being improved on a daily basis as a result. What’s more, bitcoin and other cryptocurrency prices are soaring, and our economy is being decentralized – and made more transparent – as a result.

Robotics, AI algorithms, and neural networks are increasingly being used to automate just about everything. Data can now be gathered and processed with ease, taking the information age just one step further since the rise of the internet.

Each of these technologies has been applied to medicine before. Estonia is integrating blockchain technology into its entire healthcare system. Robotics are increasingly being used in prosthetics. Private medical practices and hospitals have been digitizing the data that is patient records, and saving it to hard drives – or even to the cloud – for ages.

Clearly, these three key trends in technological advancement can be used to make healthcare more accessible on the national – and even on the international – level. One new startup – eHealth First – is bringing all three of them together to do just that.