Rewriting health care: John Denning creates software to simplify insurance options.

Negrea, Sherrie

Last June, in a competition at the Royal Society in London, John Denning, Sloan '98, drew international attention with a chatbot named "Eugene Goostman." The program, which purported to be a 13-year-old Ukrainian with a bad attitude, became the first to pass the Turing Test inspired by a 1950 paper on artificial intelligence by computer scientist Alan Turing.

Now, Denning and his partners are applying a version of that technology to health care. Imagine logging onto a website to choose a health insurance plan. After supplying information about about your medical history, your doctor, and your prescriptions, the software matches you with the best plan for your needs.

That's the idea behind Wholesale Change, which was co-founded by Denning and his chatbot collaborators. Building on their success, the company uses algorithms to quickly lead consumers to the most affordable, personalized Medicare plan available.

"The engine that we created for Eugene, we've rebuilt it 20 times," Denning says. "It's the same kind of approach, but not the same engine--it's a descendant."

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Denning's passion for computerizing health care dates back to his enlistment in the U.S. Army, straight out of high school. With co-workers at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Denning created the military's first electronic health record, and received a medal for using algorithms to dramatically reduce the appointment backlog.

After earning his master's degree in health care administration from the Sloan Program in Health Administration, Denning became the product manager of EpicCare, now the most widely used electronic health record software. Three years later, he became the architect of Kaiser Permanente's Health Connect, the world's largest private electronic health record system.

Frustrated with slow improvement in the health care system, Denning started Wholesale Change in 2012, and is now its CEO. "We aren't willing to make incremental changes," he says. "We want things to be patient-organized. The system right now is set up to serve the participants in the health care system who are not the patients."

With service currently available in California, Florida, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Texas, Wholesale Change will soon add an algorithm that allows consumers to select their own doctors and hospitals.

As the company expands, the software will incorporate a spoken language interface that enables consumers to chat with the website.

"Are people going to trust it?" Denning asks. "It's a matter of getting out there in a way that people can have a comfort level talking to computers."

Sherrie Negrea is a freelance writer.