Ask YC: Saving Health Care.
1. costs for the same treatment continue to rise, when technology should be bringing the cost of treatment down for a given health problem.
2. doctors raise rates to cover non payments from either the insurance company and or the patient, this is a clearly systemic payment processing problem.
3. the raw motives of an insurance company cause it to appreciate high medical costs so people attach to their service. they have an interest in making sure the system is broken.
4. some medical solutions are not profitable so many people find profitable ways to solve our health problems. (i have been behind closed doors when this happens)
5. it's nearly impossible to use open source software as part of healthcare, THIS NEEDS TO CHANGE.
----
at the risk of our system turning into a clone of sweden's, canada's or japan's health care system i have an alternative.
----
1. create a set of payment processing standards and regulate the hell out of them, these should be more regulated than the banking industry. CPC codes describe the treatment or care given, CPC code pairings should be regulated given a health condition, but not the price. the cpc codes should pass through a validation engine like the ones used for HTML and XHTML and the standards should be agreed on by a community of doctors. the codes should be given in a time sequence as the patients condition changes. doctors should ultimately have the option to use un approved treatments in rare cases.
bills that pass the engine, will be required to be payed by the insurance company.
2. get all of the treatments in a real time DB and have video observe patient care, then multiple doctors can confirm on care, and increasing accuracy while not needing to be local. this should also make healthcare law suits cheaper, and hospitals that opt into it would limit their liability as part of the reward for exposing more patient data. it could also be used as a teaching tool if doctors and patient gave permissions.
3. create an insurance company that looks at their data set and invests in treatments that are costing them alot of money, the idea is that if they own the IP that cost reduces healthcare, then they will profit from all of the other hospitals switching to the cheaper solution.
4. use prize economics to award prizes to healthcare needs that everyone can benefit from, and then give that tech away to the world. I would be all for our government putting up a 1-10 billion dollar prize to any group that can solve aids, cancer, diabetes, etc... creating a system where companies do not have to worry about how to profit from an invention is really worth it for all of us. Merc will spend up to $1billion creating a drug that marginally works. I am not for socialized healthcare, but i am for socialized healthcare solutions.
5. currently the cost to validate opensource software and patches is extremely cost prohibitive, there should either be a company that releases validated versions of an OpenSource software package, or we should change the law so that open source software can be used more easily.
What ideas do you have?