Silicon Valley's largest tech accelerator is funding an experiment in crowdfunded healthcare

pulse

February 8, 2017 5:49 PM

Y Combinator is funding a nonprofit called Watsi, which will test a platform of crowdfunded healthcare in the developing world.

By 2035, there could be almost no poor countries.

Crowdfunding gets a lot of attention when it gives rise to oddball games and novelty technology, but Silicon Valley's largest startup accelerator believes the real bet is on crowdfunded healthcare.

Y Combinator, the company responsible for launching Airbnb, Dropbox, and Reddit, has announced that it will invest in Watsi — a nonprofit that has brought healthcare to more than 11,000 people in 24 countries through nearly 22,000 online donations.

Sam Altman, president of YC, explains that Watsi's approach to healthcare avoids a huge number of operational inefficiencies. A recent report from the World Health Organization calculated that 20-40% of all health spending worldwide gets wasted. But Watsi's crowdfunding model makes transparency a top priority — each patient's received donations and healthcare provider are logged in a master spreadsheet available on Watsi's website.

"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.," Watsi c

By creating a leaner form of healthcare, which attempts to lower medical costs by promoting transparency and spotting fraud and errors in real-time, Watsi believes it can reduce the public burden of caring for the ill. Instead of bearing exorbitant, hard-to-understand bills, recipients of Watsi donations would receive fully crowdfunded care.

During the experiment, one of Watsi's primary goals will be to expand the treatments it can fund while still keeping costs low.

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