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Seems like government intervention is the problem -- specifically, occupational licensing. There is a huge barrier right now for ML-healthcare startups that already can provide better diagnoses than normal doctors in some cases (and at a fraction of the cost), but are at an impasse to license their technology to legally "practice medicine."

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Why don't these startups apply it first to countries where the patients are there but the doctors are lacking?

If I was a doctor I'd love to have a ML assistant who will also look over my patients' symptoms and find correlations that I missed. Is that any more "practicing medicine" than a reference book is?

So we need a free software effort to produce some kind of machine learning/statistical analysis tools that would not be sold but merely used by whoever wants them. The user should be a medical professional using the tool as an aid much like a reference book. A good doctor doesn't take the book as gospel (at least my GP doesn't) but weighs what it says together with the specifics of the case and so on together with his or her own experience. So perhaps a grassroots start could be possible.

Of course the major stumbling block of access to good data remains.

It doesn't need to be free - good medical reference books aren't, either.

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