National healthcare benefits company Anthem Inc. announced Wednesday it has partnered with blockchain-based artificial intelligence platform Doc.ai Inc. to develop a data trial designed to predict when allergies might strike.

Allergies plague more than 50 million Americans with symptoms each year; over 40 percent of children have allergies and over 30 percent of adults also suffer. Although symptoms may range from itchy eyes, sneeze and runny noses, food allergies can be critical and lead to hospitalization – leading to approximately 200,000 emergency room visits a year.

It is estimated, by WebMD Medical Reference, that allergies cost the U.S. healthcare system $18 billion annually.

To better understand how allergies affect people and the patterns that arise, Anthem and Doc.ai are putting together a 12-month trial using AI and machine learning algorithms to identify predictive models for allergies.

To do this, Doc.ai’s advisors from Harvard will take health data from sample groups based on phenome (such as height, weight and age), exposome (environmental effects such as weather and pollution based on location), and physiome (such as physical activity, daily steps and diet).

This data will be correlated in a massive database collected from trial subjects in an effort to build a pool of historical information that can be mined for patterns that would connect back to locations, behaviors and certain health factors that would give a better picture of when allergies are triggered and who they affect.

“Our exposomes — including air pollution, pollen, and even the changes in the weather — can exacerbate and cause allergy and its irritating symptoms,” said Dr. Chirag Patel, assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. “So far, prediction of allergy symptoms for individuals based on their exposomic and health history has been limited and is far from use as a tool for intervention to close the loop.”

Doc.ai’s platform requires a massive amount of data to become useful and to encourage users to provide health data and enable that to be shared with healthcare professionals, the company will use its blockchain platform to enhance privacy and security for that information.

The company has looked to a blockchain instead of a secure database, because blockchains provide an automated audit trail and a mechanism of cryptographic proof of agreement in the form of smart contracts. Doc.ai’s ecosystem is built on the popular open-source Ethereum blockchain platform in order to enable these smart contracts, thus allowing users to maintain control and ownership of their own data and define how it is used by other parties.

This is similar to how healthcare blockchain Health Wizz connects healthcare records. With the Health Wizz blockchain, patients maintain control of their own health data, secured on devices from prying eyes, but can open it up to share with new doctors, hospitals and even researchers or industry data brokers.

Because of the information contained, patient healthcare records are not just importantly private, but they are also very valuable to the industry at large. As a result, platforms that respect the privacy and security of participants – in this case, the allergy study trial members – while also allowing that data to be aggregated for enhancing an understanding of human health, makes it an important test of the technology.

Allergies are a good start for such a platform as well, being that they cost such a significant amount in time and energy for both patients and the healthcare industry at large. However, Anthem does not intend to stop there.

This is the first data trial that the company expects to host in the coming months with the intention of accelerating medical discovery and research in multiple areas including epilepsy, Crohn’s disease, Lyme disease and pain management.

“Any initiative in healthcare using AI needs scale to succeed,” said Walter De Brouwer, co-founder of Doc.ai.

By partnering with Anthem, a company that affiliates with the Blue Cross and Blue Shield healthcare insurance federation, participants for this trial could be opted-in at the scale needed.

Most importantly, he added, this technology will “enable individuals to collect and own their health data while empowering data scientists using deep learning to collaborate with consumers, doctors and researchers to find personalized healthcare solutions.”

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