Healthcare in 2021. An interview with industry leading experts

AI has been around for a long time even if you don’t notice it. The posts you see every day are chosen by AI, every UBER route is calculated by AI after processing hundreds of traffic parameters, not to mention self-driving cars designed by Tesla and other industry-leading companies.

But artificial intelligence hasn't yet conquered the field of medicine and healthcare, at least until last year. We got a lucky chance to talk with the founders of DeHealth LLC — a digital health project that is going to change the current healthcare paradigm and make affordable quality healthcare available worldwide.

They’ve already accumulated almost 3,000,000 patients and more than 30,000 doctors on their centralized healthcare platform and, as we found out, are now looking towards providing clients with full control over their medical records by tokenizing this data. The team is also developing a self-learning AI-assistant to watch over your health and a decentralized marketplace for medical goods, services and data.

Here is how our interview with Denis and Anna went:

What inspired you to launch DeHealth?

In the beginning of 2019, we were looking to launch an innovative eHealth product dedicated to preventing diseases, preserving health, and improving the quality of life. And you know, the possibility of saving millions of lives is quite motivating even to this day.

Changing the entire healthcare paradigm from healing to preventing is an interesting task, to say the least, but that’s how we came up with DeHealth. We are looking to rebuild modern medicine along the following vertical: earlier, the treatment process began from an appointment, now it will end there. First, you access an artificial intelligence platform, which contains the entire knowledge base about human health, digital patient cards and health maps. With 90% of diseases you’ll be able to help yourself, contacting a doctor only when necessary: for example, to get a consultation or when you suffer from something worse than a regular cold.  

Which countries are you currently available in? Do you have any plans on going global? How do you plan to spread awareness about your project in different countries where English is not spoken well?

At a moment DeHealth is available in Eastern Europe. Our services are being used by 2.7 mil. patients and 32,000 doctors. But we plan to add a lot of new countries by the end of 2022, such as Mexico, India, Switzerland, different CIS countries and South Korea. By 2023 we plan to have the remaining EU countries, the entire APAC and Latin America connected.

As part of our go-to-market strategy, we address three objectives: attracting millions of users around the world at minimal cost, holding back users in the system, and creating a motivational environment for regularly replenishing our medical records.

Speaking about countries where English is not that popular, we already have a partnership with an agency capable of translating both our app and our web platform into Spanish, English, French, Russian, Arabic and Chinese.

People tend to be untruthful to anything that is “private”, will it be realistic to conclude contracts with government clinics and other public organizations in the countries?

A big part of modern healthcare is somewhat “private”. After launching a pilot in Eastern Europe everything seems possible. DeHealth has already digitized all the treatment protocols in the Ministry of Health, got all required licenses and permits... we also comply with international safety standards.
90% of our clients are medical institutions controlled by the state. Doctors can easily access a digital health card and receive any required information from both the card and the previous medical records, while the patient can add personal data, family members and manage access to his data.

A few days ago, during the 8th annual national conference on economic social and cultural rights Salima Namusobya, ED Initiative for Social & Economic Rights of Uganda claimed that there are certain social services that are critical to the individual and society like education, health, social protection and that they should not be left in the hands of the private sector. How can you comment on that one? https://twitter.com/ntvuganda/status/1438122207352348675

The healthcare paradigm is changing. Strong patient communities are beginning to appear, lobbying the world for modern information systems and healthcare technologies. We are also building a community of such kind.

Patients are the main beneficiary of the healthcare system, not doctors or the state.

This raises another question, who will pay for it? Today's medical and economic standards do not cover this. We see the solution in cryptocurrencies. The state isn’t interested in paying for someone's personal treatment, but the people themselves are.

And by switching to crypto we can avoid economic and social problems, avoid stratification of society and fight poverty, as everyone will have access to affordable quality healthcare. With the help of DeHealth technologies, a doctor will be able to look deeper into the disease without 800 different tests a patient will have to pay for.

What will the Public-Private Partnership in Eastern Europe give to the project? https://medium.com/@DeHealth/the-public-private-partnership-ezdorovya-dehealth-and-the-transformation-of-the-healthcare-1e688d08a966

This opens up great opportunities for practical implementation - 30,000,000 citizens will get access to DeHealth, and we will receive lots of anonymized datasets to perfect our AI on and build a transparent market for medical data.

Using which technologies will the project help to provide a medical diagnostic and filter disease symptoms?

Apple Watch can already measure blood oxygenation. They tried adding electrocardiography, and now it seems like they are working on blood glucose levels. And that’s just Apple, there are many more gadgets that can monitor your health 24/7 without causing any inconveniences. In DeHeath, we are using a custom API to collect such data and transfer it directly to the patient's digital health card.

Our team is actively working on designing a gadget of our own.
DeHealth watch will conduct an advanced screening of the body according to hundreds of parameters and send the results to the patient's mobile application and his doctor every 24 hours. And a doctor will prescribe and adjust therapy accordingly to the received data.

Moreover, our gadget will monitor the mental and energy-informational state of the body, will also help to better understand one's own body by observing breathing, pulse oximeter readings, energy levels, menstrual cycle, pregnancy, water balance, stress levels, sleep and heart rate, including warnings about rapid and negative changes in the overall health. And all this with a research precision that many laboratories cannot provide.

This entire dataset, coming from various official sources, will be used to train DeHeatlh's artificial intelligence systems to predict the onset of diseases such as Alzheimer's, diabetes, breast cancer and schizophrenia.

Will the platform be available to everyone, especially taking into account the fact that DeHealth is committed to helping 3rd world countries (developing countries) and those counties are usually having limited financing? How is DeHealth going to solve this issue?

With DeHealth people from developing countries will be able to make money through their personal health activism.

Anyone can mine our cryptocurrency by following a healthy lifestyle, following doctors recommendations, inviting friends or performing any other activities under our loyalty program. Gained tokens can later be used to pay for a subscription to the application, doctor services, or buy vitamins. Or simply sell generated data for money and buy something else.

Think of your medical data as an asset. When handled correctly, it is the key to longevity and an improved quality of life.

You are planning to introduce your own token. What is the starting price of the token and how will it be regulated? What about those people who do not know anything about cryptocurrency?

The initial price of the token will be determined by the market itself through a Dutch auction. We expect the starting price to be about $ 0.1 per token. Everything we do will be done under Swiss jurisdiction.

As for people who are not familiar with crypto, we’ll definitely add fiat payment methods. They will be able to use our services without having an idea about how crypto works.

The security of personal data is one of the most important questions of the digital era. What are you doing with the data that is sold? Why is it safe?

CEO of Dehealth, Denis is the President of the National Cybersecurity Association of Ukraine with 13+ years of global experience in the IT industry and business architecture of software platforms and products. He is also a Member of the GDPR Council and the Council for Cybersecurity of the country.
It’s safe to say we have that part covered. Our team has a practical understanding of how to build a secure system for data transfer, as well as how to build a decentralized system for data storage and sale. The user will have complete control over his data.

Currently, the pilot has over 2.7 million users, how are you going to achieve more users to the platform and make it global?

These users came from doctors and clinics who started working with us earlier this year after we tried out the SaaS model. The next business model has undergone some changes. We will be giving subscriptions to our platform to doctors and clinics free of charge. Doctors get a free automated workstation while patients can access a wide range of different healthcare services provided by DeHealth.
We plan to reach 30,000,000 MAU by the end of 2022 after introducing both user and business subscriptions and a marketplace for healthcare products, services and data.

How do you see your project in 5 years in medical, technological and crypto terms?

By 2026, we plan to become a company that helps 200 million people solve health problems every day, have about 10 million lives saved with our services, achieve a $300 billion capitalization and own the best AI in the healthcare field.