Y Combinator & Watsi partnering to see how technology can improve healthcare

Y Combinator’s research arm YC Research is partnering healthcare nonprofit Watsi to fund a project to study the implications of technology in the healthcare space.

Though the details of the funding have not been disclosed but according to Y Combinator President Sam Altman, Watsi will be using the funds to support primary healthcare for a community in the developing world, while also building a platform to run the system “transparently.”

Speaking to VentureBeat, Chase Adam, co-founder and chief executive, Watsi said, “Funding individual patients encourages more people to donate, but it also results in patient-level data that makes it easier to identify fraud, evaluate the quality of care, measure health outcomes, etc. This project is an attempt to use those learning to re-think how healthcare is funded.”

As a crowdfunding platform, Watsi enables anyone to directly fund potentially life-changing healthcare for people around the world. To aid in the donation part, Watsi recently teamed up with PayGarden to convert unused gift cards into funds that can benefit those who need treatments.

The project will last through 2017 and Adam believes the first version of the system will be running in a small community within the next two months. If the project succeeds, Altman said that Watsi will provide governments around the world with access to the software to improve the healthcare systems in their respective countries and “provide universal healthcare for their citizens.”