What is Doc.ai? (Part 1)

Even if your only experience with the AI space has been on our site, then you have already read a bit about the industry’s push to revolutionize the health care industry. Doc.ai is one of the companies that hope to do this, with an overarching goal that uses Blockchain ideology, backed by an AI system. In summary, what this means is that they aim to shift the control of a patient’s health records, back into his or her individual hands.

On top of this, the team behind Doc.ai has the vision that it will play a large part in the entire process of health care becoming decentralized. At the same time, in seeing the reported shortage of around 7 million healthcare professionals worldwide, Doc.ai started to develop their network with the added goal of providing an alternative for patients, as compared to traditional doctors.

It is at this point where reasonably, doubts begin to come in related to any project of this nature truly taking hold. Our trust in other humans being the purveyors of health advice and treatments spans generations upon generations.

How would one company even begin to convince people that trusting an AI as their doctor is a viable option? Would any AI ever be able to express any level of empathy?

One way that Doc.ai attempts to answer this is with a simple cost analysis, related to seeing human health professionals, versus their automated professionals. In doing so, they assert that a semi-comparable option would be consulting a human doctor online, which commonly referred to as being in the “telehealth” space. In telehealth, the Doc.ai team claims that a twenty-minute consultation can cost around $100, while the same consultation with their system will roughly cost $1.

The way that such a cost difference can even exist and make sense is due to the tech behind Doc.ai. While just like many other projects, they keep many of their technical specifications private, in knowing that their product runs on chatbots, the cost savings become a bit more clear.

For most people, what we mean by chatbots here might not be clear. In this context, by chatbots, we mean a trained AI that runs 24 hours a day and has learned how to properly respond to and help patients with the direct input from healthcare professionals and data scientists. To simplify this, just think of a chatbot as a computer program that is “smarter” than most computer programs, in terms of its abilities to simulate human conversation.

With all of this in mind, it could be said to be most important to remember that Doc.ai is not looking to replace doctors, but they are looking to make their jobs easier, especially due to the worldwide shortage of healthcare professionals. The easiest way to conceptualize this is to think about Doc.ai as a system that is meant to advise the average patient on any matters related to preventative health care.

To recap, by preventative health care, we mean taking action to live in a better way with the goal of preventing any sort of future health problems that could arise, due to a lack of knowledge of exactly how our best possible lifestyles can be achieved.

In going back to the fact that Doc.ai wants to decentralize health care, we should consider their own statements on why they chose to underpin their AI system with a Blockchain, as the place for all data to be stored.

Overall, is a Blockchain necessary in this case?

In the words of their CEO, Walter De Brouwer, who actually does have a good amount of experience in the AI and health care industries, this was done because AI needs to be decentralized. From this, we can also conclude that the team believed that the Blockchain is, as of now, the best way that any technological system can become decentralized. What helps this idea along is the added element that one of the next steps in their road map involves shifting Doc.ai into a fully decentralized network of patients, health care providers, and data scientists.

In our next piece on the subject, we will discuss how all of these network users come together to form the essence of what Doc.ai is and aspires to be. In the midst of all of this, we will look at their partnerships, which include a recent one with Anthem, which is one of the most powerful medical insurance companies around.

Until then, check out the resources below including their main site and their Twitter.