In an industry full of buzzy catch-all phrases, blockchain healthcare companies need to block out the noise.
Blockchain has the power to connect disparate health data sets, improve the supply chain, and reduce payment and reimbursement inefficiencies. But to get the necessary buy-in for this transformation, companies need to show wary healthcare organizations that it’s more than the trend of the day, experts said,
“When you talk to blockchain healthcare professionals, the first reaction you often get is, ‘I don’t want bitcoin or that crypto shit,'” said Pradeep Goel, CEO of Solve.Care, a company creating a customer relationship management platform using blockchain. “There is a non-technical crowd that confuses blockchain with crypto. Crypto is a use case, not the definition, of blockchain.
Blockchain technology allows organizations to share distributed and decentralized assets over a network in a secure manner. Once people understand the value of blockchain and how they can use it, they tend to come back, but it often takes a common goal to get the ball rolling, Goel said.
Such was the case when the Synaptic Health Alliance was formed in 2018 by Aetna, Humana, MultiPlan, Quest Diagnostics, and UnitedHealth Group. The alliance sought to use blockchain technology to update provider information in health plan directories. Synaptic provides a secure infrastructure to synchronize directory information between different insurers.
In four years, what began as a pilot project grew from an initial deployment in Texas to full operation in Colorado, Florida, Michigan and New York. At the end of the year, Syanptic Health Alliance co-founder Kyle Culver said the company was planning a nationwide rollout.
“Blockchain allows us to decentralize the dataset and solve the ownership problem,” Culver said. “We can make it a community-owned asset and then explore incentive models where it’s sustainable and fair for everyone.”
Citing data from the Council for Affordable Quality Healthcare, Culver said more than $2 billion is wasted by insurers managing provider datasets and about 80% of information is duplicated. About half of the data remains unchanged over 18 months, he said. Insurers needed a more efficient way to share information so that when someone receives an update, it can be shared with others, he said. More than 50% of vendor directory locations have at least one inaccuracy, according to a CMS review.
The financial incentive to modify this data and the fact that it is a community-owned asset made it an ideal use case for blockchain, Culver said. But it’s harder to find in other areas of health, he said, noting that industry is rarely early adopters of many new technologies.
“It will take some time for people to gain more experience with these use cases and then collaborate on other systemic issues,” Culver said.