Democratize Healthcare.Expertly.

The success of fintech in democratizing finance¹ so financial services are “friendly, approachable and understandable for newcomers and experts alike”² offers hope that healthtech can democratize healthcare³ empowering every person to claw back satisfying outcomes from the high-cost, low quality U.S. healthcare⁴ system. Fintech democratizes when it is consumer-controlled, sidestepping technology that enables corporate referrees—banks and brokers—to control the data and wealth of individuals. Healthtech will democratize when it too is consumer-controlled, sidestepping wellness apps and patient portals with which corporate referees—employers, health plans and healthcare organizations—control the data and health of individuals.
The COVID-19 pandemic⁵ revealed the risks of our fractured healthcare system for all but the wealthiest and the need for top-down structural reform⁶. Meanwhile, the rest of us need a new bottom-up kind of healthtech, controlled by patients and family caregivers not by the private and public entities who employ, insure, and manage healthcare services and products. We need consumer-controlled healthtech that saves us time on system navigation⁷ to spend on healthy behavior and engagement with trusted healthcare providers.

Higher prices⁸ explain why the US spends nearly twice as much on healthcare compared to other high-income countries. Comparatively less US spending per capita on resources (hospital beds, physicians, nurses) and skewed allocation of resources to high-income communities may explain why the COVID-19 pandemic cut US life expectancy⁹ during the first half of 2020 by one year for White-, two for Hispanic- and three for Black-Americans. Higher prices and scarce resources may explain why life expectancy¹⁰ is longer than 20 years ago for high-income men and women, unchanged for low-income males, and declining for low-income women. Why chronic health conditions¹¹ are overrepresented among U.S. adults (28%). And why older people¹² covered by Medicare cannot afford necessary care.

The RK360^® Cloud Health Record App implements the consumer-controlled healthtech mission by enabling users to be more efficient and productive when navigating the healthcare system regardless of gender, health, income, old age, or race. The versatile RK360^® App lets users choose among tasks related to system navigation, care engagement and healthy behavior that suit their current needs. Corresponding to each task is an expert AI agent, with an algorithm that leverages the knowledge and reasoning of domain experts.
A key system navigation task involves coordination of patient care¹³ across providers and time in order to avoid medical errors¹⁴ and surprise bills¹⁵. Before each telehealth or onsite healthcare visit, the RK360^® App user taps a few buttons to activate the care-coordination expert agent for RK360^® App follow through on a care-coordination cycle of subtasks. During each cycle, the RK360^® App communicates patient requests under applicable federal and state laws and evidence-based practice standards and offers providers tools for complying with those requests and receiving documentation of their compliance.
Without the RK360^® App, consumers can spend countless hours on the phone and in person trying to coordinate care for primary care, diagnostic workup, specialist consult, follow up, and care transition visits. With the App, consumers let the RK360^® Care-Coordination Agent do the heavy lifting.
Consumers capture, own, and control their multi-source, multi-type, immutable clinical and financial data in a two-factor-authenticated cloud health record and do the same for family members for whom they make healthcare decisions and serve as HIPAA personal representative¹⁶. All without knowing much about record access rights¹⁷ under HIPAA and 21^st Century Cures rules¹⁸.
Consumers drive exchange of immutable contents of cloud records (and those of family members they represent) with high-tech providers via interoperable electronic health record systems (EHRs) and with low-tech providers via two-factor authenticated web portals. All without knowing much about industry technical standards¹⁹ or government regulations²⁰ for interoperability²¹.
Consumers own and control for clinical purposes all personally identifiable radiology images, genomic profiles, patient-reported outcomes and other immutable data in their (and their family members’) longitudinal cloud records and can choose to profit from leasing deidentified data for research. All without knowing much about “the new currency” ²² involving patient data ownership²³ for big data.
The RK360^® App is for people like Keira a 45-year-old bookkeeper and cancer survivor who makes health care decisions for herself, her husband with MS, her special-needs teenage son, and her elderly parents. Keira is a fictitious persona representing one in five Americans who are unpaid family caregivers²⁴. Her family resembles 45% of nonelderly U.S. families²⁵ with at least one chronically ill member. She wants an app that makes care coordination more efficient²⁶, saving time for walks with her husband and bike rides with her son.
We recognize and appreciate the risks of COVID-19 to healthcare workers²⁷ and their families as well as their knowledge of what consumers need. If you are a healthcare worker with an individual or organizational National Provider Identifier (NPI), subscribe to no-cost beta test RK360^® Cloud Health Records for yourself and your family. Beta-testers retain their no-cost annual RK360^® subscriptions, valued at $120, as long as they frequently use their RK360^® Records.