A National Healthcare Alliance for the Underserved of America

Every one of us has felt the anxiety of a potentially serious health problem affecting our own life or that of someone we love.

Now imagine you were forced to make a terrifying choice: risk complications and death by delaying care you need, or go bankrupt paying for care you cannot afford.

Millions of people everyday face this no-win situation. Over 30 million Americans lack access to medical expertise and in 2015, 11 million were pushed into poverty as a result of medical costs (Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Current Population Reports). Globally, more than a billion people lack access to even basic medical insight, and each year 150 million suffer financial catastrophe from this (Source: World Health Organization).

Doctors around the country and the world have had enough. The Human Diagnosis Project (Human Dx), built by and for the world’s doctors, exists to solve this problem. Human Dx is an open intelligence system that maps the steps to help any patient, and combines the collective intelligence of doctors with machine learning to enable any doctor to get fast and accurate input on any patient they are helping. More than 6,000 doctors from over 70 countries and 500 medical institutions are already involved in contributing their knowledge to the Project — analogous to Wikipedia, Linux, and other open knowledge efforts. Human Dx itself is organized as a tandem 501(c)(3) non-profit and public benefit corporation to enable a true partnership of the social, private, and public sectors.

Today, we have some big news.

We’re launching the Human Dx Alliance for the Underserved, a partnership of the nation’s top medical societies, institutions, and boards dedicated specifically to expanding physician access for those who cannot afford it.

The Human Dx Alliance for the Underserved includes:

• The American Medical Association
• The American Board of Internal Medicine
• The American Board of Medical Specialties
• The Association of American Medical Colleges
• The Association of Clinicians for the Underserved
• The National Association of Community Health Centers

Right now, nearly 30 million underserved Americans rely on the safety net system of community health centers and free clinics to provide primary care services regardless of their ability to pay. While many of these individuals are able to receive basic medical care, they lack access to timely and affordable specialist care. For example: when an underserved patient needs to see a cardiologist, oncologist, or surgeon, he or she often has to pay out-of-pocket or wait as long as a year for an appointment at a public hospital.

This specialist gap can result in expensive visits to the emergency room, or worse — critical health problems going untreated altogether. Often the answer is not more tests, procedures, or treatments, but rather the right medical expertise at the right time. Fixing this specialist gap requires building technology to house medical knowledge in a single, open, and universally-accessible system.

We intend to help close the specialty care gap by building a nationwide electronic consult (eConsult) service where U.S. safety net physicians can get the information they need from specialists to provide the best care for their patients. A treating doctor simply inputs his or her patient’s background and medical findings into the Human Dx eConsult system, which then invites specialists to review the case and input their recommended tests and diagnosis.

Together, the Alliance will implement the eConsult system in 8,000 safety net clinics with 50,000 specialists to directly serve over three million patients, while permanently extending the capacity of the safety net to close the specialty care gap for its 30 million patients.

Each patient helped will add to the Human Dx system and bring us closer to a more inclusive, sustainable, and open future of medicine for all of humankind.

Jayanth Komarneni is the founder and chair of the Human Diagnosis Project.