Five Healthcare Organizations Launch Blockchain Pilot Program

On Apr 2, 2018

Five leading healthcare organizations – Humana, MultiPlan, Quest Diagnostics and UnitedHealth Group’s Optum and UnitedHealthcare – announced that they are launching a pilot program applying blockchain technology to improve data quality and reduce administrative costs associated with changes to healthcare provider demographic data, a critical, complex and difficult issue facing organizations across the healthcare system.

The companies will explore how the technology could help ensure the most current healthcare provider information is available in health plan provider directories. Providing consumers looking for care with accurate information when they need it is essential to a high-functioning overall healthcare system.

Today, managed care organizations, health systems, physicians, diagnostic information service providers and other healthcare stakeholders typically maintain separate copies of healthcare provider data, which can result in time-intensive and expensive reconciliation processes when differences arise. Industry estimates indicate that $2.1 billion is spent annually across the healthcare system chasing and maintaining provider data.*

The pilot will examine how sharing data across healthcare organizations on blockchain technology can improve data accuracy, streamline administration and improve access to care.

The pilot will also address the high cost of healthcare provider data management, testing the premise that administrative costs and data quality can be improved by sharing provider data inputs and changes made by different parties across a blockchain, potentially reducing operational costs while improving data quality.

For additional information, please reach out to the contacts listed below.

“With the explosion of health data, organizations need better ways to share and harness information to yield clinical and economic value. Quest is committed to empowering better health with diagnostic insights. We are connected to more than 650 EHR platforms and a majority of health systems and physicians in the U.S., so we bring a unique level of insight into how to connect people and organizations across healthcare.  We look forward to sharing these insights with our alliance collaborators as we jointly explore blockchain’s potential to improve healthcare data exchange.” – Lidia L. Fonseca, senior vice president and chief information officer (CIO) for Quest Diagnostics, the leading provider of diagnostic information services.

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