In the latest episode of Dinis Guarda YouTube podcast, CEO of Solve.care, Pradeep Goel, talks about the tech-enabled transformation of the healthcare industry. With increased integration of emerging technologies like Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence, healthcare is progressing towards a transparent system that gives the patients and caregivers the ownership of their own data. The podcast is powered by Businessabc.net and citiesabc.com.
Pradeep Goel is an expert in blockchain, finance, technology, and healthcare. He has more than 30 years of healthcare experience, developing cutting-edge software for the insurance industry, and co-founding four healthcare IT businesses where he has served in several management roles including CEO, COO, CIO, and CTO.
According to him: “Tech isn't going to be adopted just because it's good tech. You have to make it work for the people who are going to be impacted by it. Good tech can scare people right because it impacts their livelihood or they're afraid they lose their job. But there is a Human Side of Technology that serves people. People don't serve technology and the people the technology normally serves aren't technical so you have to learn to make technology work for them.”
It was this vision that he founded Solve.care, a global healthcare blockchain platform that is involved in care coordination, improved access to care, empowering consumers with information, reduced benefit administration costs, and helping reduce fraud and waste in healthcare around the world.
Solve.care: Addressing the issues faced by modern day healthcare
Pradeep explained that the problem with legacy systems is the aggregation of power to increase profitability at the intermediary level:
“Systems are built to serve but systems become the problem. I don't mean just a tech system: I mean the system, the organization, the process, the philosophy, the rules, and then the IT. All of that combined, becomes a barrier and it is particularly evident and profoundly impactive on humanity because in the simplest sense healthcare is about somebody needing care and somebody giving care.
But then intermediaries appear with good intentions, with the idea of helping. But then a second generation of that intermediary becomes about profiteering so then they start to profit and focus on the profit and then the third generation of executives comes in and becomes about control and slowly and slowly this entity in the middle goes from being a service entity to being a control entity and a blocker!”
He also explained the level of the problem using an analogy:
“Healthcare around the world costs $8,000 billion a year. Imagine if healthcare was a country it would be one of the richest countries in the world, probably number four. And this country is run by a lot of intermediaries. Both the patient and the doctors serve this country or live in this country in a manner where neither of them are happy or effective because the power structure of this country is just a very high stack of intermediaries. Whether it's managed care plans, pharmacy, benefit managers, health management organizations, brokers, or insurance companies - you cannot even keep track of how high this stack of intermediaries is. These intermediaries today take 2,000 billion out of 8,000 billion to help manage care so they're basically 25% of the country's economy.”
Pradeep explained to Dinis that Solve.care eliminates the intermediary level.
“No society can really sustain itself when the interests of the care provider and the caregiver are subsumed by the intermediaries who were supposed to help but now are too busy being rich. That's, I think, the fundamental issue that I saw in many different ways when I was working in the healthcare system.
I understood that the problem isn't building better IT solutions. The solution is to replace or eliminate this preponderance of middlemen that exist today.”
Blockchain and AI: Tech solutions by Solve.care
By layering itself on the blockchain, Solve.care introduces transparency and ownership of data for patients:
“We replace the intermediaries so that both patient and provider, the healthcare provider and the healthcare recipient can have more effective and direct communication and we need to replace it with something that won't get corrupted with time. The technology must be designed in a way that it is absolutely respectful of every stakeholder's rights including their privacy and their right to have their data and control it and this technology blockchain being one of the key components of such a you know principle really should be built from the ground up such that it cannot be corrupted down the road.
We should monetize the true service of connecting people together in a manner that they have full control over their identity. Tech should be built so that it can not change its mind one day. It has been a long road for us to go from that vision to reality. The premise here is to allow for equitable conversation, transaction, payment, billing, appointment, referral, and record exchange to happen. Healthcare needs to function in a completely decentralized manner. That's the core premise of Solve.care: Bringing equity to healthcare.”
Speaking about the potentials of Artificial Intelligence in the healthcare, Pradeep says:
“AI has enormous promise. I can have and will have more optionality of care: self-care or professional care, because AI gives me better insights in terms of risk factors in terms of care models, better treatment plans, and personalized medicine. On the reverse side, you have highly aggregated data pools whether it's in government or in insurance companies or EMRs, in large hospital systems, that gives them significant power they can choose to improve healthcare or exploit healthcare.
AI amplifies the risks of power imbalance. It has great potential to improve care but if our data resides in the hands of the few, then yes, we’ve got a very serious issue coming our way.”
Concluding the interview in a positive note, Pradeep tells Dinis:
“With AI, there is an opportunity to build a collective mechanism to improve research. AI can accelerate cure for cancer, can find more invisible patterns that we haven't all noticed yet, identify root causes of cure because that's what all research is only about identifying the patterns we all missed. I think using AI to advance treatment is good for humanity and should be done and we need to pull data to do that.
But then the beneficiary cannot be a company, the beneficiary must be humanity. For that, we need to implement a more decentralized framework where data is pulled but de-identified and the beneficiary is also everybody, not just one central authority.
In a nutshell, AI presents unique opportunities, unique threats, and the threat of AI becoming smarter than us. Starting to act to our disadvantage clearly needs to be managed through regulation and through governance.”
