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An initiative to evaluate how blockchain technology can be used to improve the veracity of health data is gaining new participants.
The Aetna and Ascension health insurer, the nation's largest Catholic delivery system, have announced they will join the Synaptic Health Alliance, a pilot program that is investigating how blockchain technology can benefit the healthcare industry .
Last April, five health insurers and clinical laboratory Quest Diagnostics launched the Synaptic Health Alliance to assess how to use blockchain technology to ensure that the most up-to-date information on providers is available in health care provider directories, making it easier for consumers have the right information when seeking assistance.
Aetna brings its 22 million insurers and will help to create innovative solutions with alliance partners. Ascension offers a view of the supplier to the complexity of contributing to accurate care providers' directories.
"By collaborating with organizations across our industry, rather than through unique and separate data collection solutions, we can enable traveling members to be healthy as well as being a partner for service providers," says Paul McBride, vice president. president of network strategy and provider experience for Aetna.
State and federal laws require insurers to maintain directories with information about doctors and other types of providers.
In addition to Quest Diagnostics, the original members included Humana, MultiPlan, Optum and UnitedHealthcare.
With an estimate of over $ 2 billion spent annually on the acquisition and maintenance of supplier data, the pilot program explores how blockchain can be used to share data to unveil savings on administrative costs for payers and suppliers while improving the quality of supplier data, thus improving consumers' experiences.
In a white paper, participants observe that bad provider data harm all stakeholders, while health plans are particularly vulnerable as they can be penalized up to $ 25,000 per day per beneficiary or banned from new registrations and marketing if the their directories have high error rates. Patients who discover that the insurance information they have about doctors, places, hours, services and other metrics are wrong can undermine trust in an insurer.
Furthermore, because payers and suppliers often maintain separate copies of the supplier's data, when discrepancies are found, efforts to reconcile them are expensive and expensive.
Aetna headquarters in Hartford, Connecticut.
Blockchain, however, allows the creation of a synchronized and shared source of supplier data through a decentralized ledger distributed over a peer-to-peer network, according to the authors of the white paper.
The transactions are recorded chronologically in a cooperative manner and resistant to tampering and updates posted anywhere in their register are immediately replicated on all copies of the other parts.
See also: The start of work on blockchain requires a good health use case
When updates to a transaction are entered and accepted, the updates modify, rather than change, these transactions. All transactions and updates remain visible and unchanged, providing a real-time audit trail and ensuring data integrity.
The supplier data management problems that the Synaptic Health Alliance first addresses include the health system's dependency on accurate supplier data; the pervasiveness of inaccurate supplier data; the negative impact of widespread supplier data errors on consumers; the inefficiency of current supplier data management processes; the non-proprietary and non-competitive nature of the provider's demographic data and, consequently, the low obstacle to sharing and comparing data between companies.
More information is available here.
Joseph Goedert
Goedert is a senior editor of Health data management, a SourceMedia publication.
