As time goes by, blockchain technologies are transforming one industry after another. Now the startup project Skychain Global is developing its own crypto currency called Skychain Global Coin (SGC) with a view to create an ecosystem that will enable multiple participants to use and monetize healthcare artificial intelligence systems and healthcare big data necessary for AI training.

In that regard, Skychain is very similar to another blockchain project, IOTA. Both Skychain and IOTA are aimed at solving their specific problems, for which blockchain technologies come most handy. IOTA will create a unified ecosystem with a data marketplace for zillions of “smart things,” and Skychain will bring together the key parties of the digital healthcare industry. Let’s see how exactly Skychain is going to dramatically cut costs and improve effectiveness in that industry.

One of the core ingredients of Skychain is artificial intelligence systems developed by independent AI labs. Most importantly, any commercial AI system for the healthcare industry must be “trained” on massive amounts of data, also known as “big data.”. After “learning” on big data, the AI system will detect specific medical conditions very accurately.

So the second key participant in the Skychain ecosystem is a healthcare data provider. The Skychain Data Market will be the place where many data providers will be offering their datasets to AI developers. Moreover, the data providers won’t lose their data but will only provide them as a service for AI training. Skychain guarantees that data providers will get their commission for each use of any AI system trained on their data.

So far, Skychain is the only digital healthcare project that can actually succeed in doing that! It will use “smart contracts” (self-executing contracts with the terms of the agreement written directly into the code) to ensure that the implementation of any trained AI system is hidden from everyone and protected, and that each time a consumer (a doctor or a patient) uses an AI system, its developer and the data providers on whose data it was trained will be automatically rewarded.

By adopting that approach, Skychain will reduce healthcare AI training costs by a factor of 100, because currently 95–99 percent of any healthcare AI budget is spent on buying or licensing data for AI training.

What impact will it have? It will dramatically reduce the costs of healthcare AI development and training. Many more AI systems for medical diagnostics will be available to doctors and patients.

Skychain will create a healthcare data marketplace and provide an opportunity to healthcare data owners to profit from their datasets. The company will eventually create an ecosystem that can transcend any closed, proprietary products and any other open AI marketplaces, because none of the existing AI marketplaces can provide easy access to healthcare big data.

Let’s imagine what can happen after the Skychain project develops and evolves for 10 years: probably every medical measuring or diagnostic device, such as an X-ray machine, will automatically upload its results to the blockchain-based global healthcare system, which will also allow the health facility to earn extra money.

Patients will get most preliminary diagnoses on their own, without visiting a doctor’s office. They won’t need to wait in line for hours at the clinic, because going to the clinic will be akin to visiting a tanning salon. The patients will be automatically scanned (for example, by an ultrasound scanner) and nearly instantly get a highly accurate diagnosis made by an AI system. As a result, medical diagnostics costs will be dramatically reduced, and tens of millions of lives will be saved worldwide thanks to the affordable early diagnostics.

Massive amounts of big data will be accumulated in the unified data marketplace, which will allow the doctors to assess the effectiveness of treatment with different medicines and automatically generate the most appropriate treatment regimen.

I believe that soon enough artificial intelligence systems trained on readily available healthcare big data will be widely used to develop new medicines and discover new diseases.

Are we going to replace the doctors? No, we are not, at least not today. So far, we are only going to enable the development of smart tools that will help many doctors work more effectively and do fewer errors. However, we believe that in only five years diagnostic AI systems will be used in about 50 percent of all doctor’s office visits, and the doctors will only need to confirm the results produced by the AI systems and click OK.

We also believe that in 10–15 years artificial intelligence systems will do the bulk of the doctors’ work. They will perform surgical operations, diagnose medical conditions, prescribe and monitor medical treatment, and so on. Moreover, they will predict diseases years before the onset of symptoms. AI systems will make the paramedics’ work much more efficient, too. Skychain, or a similar blockchain project, will be the keystone in that ecosystem.

The Skychain project is pre-saling its tokens from December 18, 2017 to January 7, 2018. The project is at an early stage: the minimum viable product (MVP) is being developed, and preparations for the ICO are underway. For this reason, Skychain tokens are currently offered at a 50 percent discount.

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