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The health services company owned by McKesson, Change Healthcare, is buying startup blockchain assets for an undisclosed sum.
Change Healthcare announced the purchase of PokitDok on Tuesday following a CNBC report according to which the health IT service provider was discussing to acquire the specialized health care blockchain company.
As part of the agreement, Change Healthcare has acquired the intellectual property of the company and the PokitDok team. Change will integrate the PokitDok APIs into its "Intelligent Healthcare Network", adding "new digital health features, telemedicine and other new disruptive assistance models". The network serves 2200 government and payment links alongside 5,500 hospitals and 900,000 physicians.
The acquisition is added to the existing blockchain platform of Change Healthcare, which was implemented throughout the company in 2017 to address the management of administrative claims. Last month, the company announced an agreement with the TIBCO software to build the first "intelligent contract system" for health care using blockchain technology to automate transactions. This solution aims to simplify the manual administrative interactions between payers and suppliers.
RELATED: Aetna, Ascension adheres to the blockchain alliance by directing the directories of the providers
"This acquisition is about practical innovation to create a more connected, transparent and efficient healthcare system in which patients monitor their information," said Kris Joshi, Ph.D., executive vice president and president of solutions, in a statement. of Change Healthcare network. "As a leader in health care blockchain and one of the largest open API marketplaces available, with PokitDok we are bringing together synergistic assets and technical expertise to provide additional capabilities to our customers and accelerated value to the health markets. digital".
Launched in 2011, PokitDok generated over $ 55 million in venture capital funding. Acquisition comes when suppliers and suppliers are increasingly exploring the use of blockchain technology to tackle expensive and time-consuming administrative tasks. Aetna and Ascension have recently joined a blockchain alliance launched at the start of this year by UnitedHealth, Quest Diagnostics and Humana aimed at improving the accuracy of provider directories.
WellCare and Spectrum Health have also joined a new pilot project launched by Hashed Health's ProCredEx to simplify the physician credential process. These seem to be some of the most promising use cases for blockchain technology in the health sector, although skepticism about technology is profound and there has been little evidence that distributed ledger technology can effectively solve these administrative burdens.
