Millions of veteran health care records are being used to train this startup's artificial intelligence

Last spring the startup Flow Health began a five-year contract with the Department of Veteran Affairs to examine all historic and ongoing medical records. The startup will use information obtained from those records to train artificial intelligence to, among other things, fight illness and predict disease for the more than eight million people cared for by the Department of Veteran Affairs. Advice and predictions from Flow Health will be presented to health care professionals through Vista, the DoD's open source system for electronic medical records. Doctors can then choose to apply or ignore the advice drawn from the VA's vast storage of medical records. "When a veteran comes in and presents certain clinical symptoms, we can better understand and make predictions about'What is the likely diagnosis? What is the best diagnostic test? What's the best care pathway?' and so forth," CEO Alex Meshkin told VentureBeat in a Skype interview.