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The Aetna main insurer and the Ascension multi-health care system are the last two partners of the Synaptic Health Alliance, a collaboration between a number of organizations seeking to apply blockchain technology to health care.
Initially launched in April by Humana, MultiPlan, Quest Diagnostics and Optum of UnitedHealth Group and UnitedHealthcare, the group's first pilot project is directing technology to the issue of inaccurate medical records in the health plan.
Keeping healthcare providers' directories up-to-date is an administrative and cost-intensive burden for the industry, with an estimated $ 2.1 billion in health care spending to acquire and maintain accurate supplier data.
Even with this cost, a CMS review found that 52% of the directory locations of the listed providers had at least one inaccuracy, potentially detrimental to the patient's ability to access treatment. Data inaccuracies can also damage suppliers who have incorrect contact information or are incorrectly listed as offline.
In addition to the labor costs associated with the process of updating and largely confirming the directory of suppliers, the system creates information silos between companies with the same general objective.
The hope is that, using the blockchain, which is distributed across many systems and can easily track changes in provider data, accuracy can be greatly improved at a fraction of the cost. Synaptic is planning to create an authorized blockchain that allows members to view, enter, validate, update and control data from non-proprietary providers within the network.
The alliance, which exposed its plans and ambitions in a research paper entitled "Improving the accuracy of provider data", also emphasized the ability to blockchain the traditional barriers to collaboration due to the its decentralized nature.
"Blockchain is a logical choice for technological disruptions because it offers integrated transparency and verifiability of transactions without an intermediary,
so the control will be decentralized and all the participating organizations will be even, "says the document.
The Synaptic pilot project, which is among the most ambitious single blockchain initiatives in the healthcare sector, will initially focus on one of the main geographic markets and a common set of suppliers.
Going forward, the group plans to expand the footprint of the blockchain database and build a technology infrastructure to share supplier data for other use cases such as sharing clinical data between plans and suppliers.
Other blockchain applications in the healthcare sector Synaptic said it is exploring the idea of helping life science companies to track drugs, creating longitudinal health records that can be easily accessed by patients and simplify pre-authorization for medical procedures. .
"Everyone in this industry has dreamed of interoperability for a long time – Blockchain is a key to this – better data quality leads to better decision-making, better patient care and experience – this is the promise of what this Alliance hopes to offer, "said Lidia Fonseca IOC of Quest Diagnostics in a statement.
Image: Getty Images, Ismagilov
