Today, at the Distributed: Health 2017 conference in Nashville, Tennessee, Change Healthcare announced blockchain solutions on an enterprise scale. According to the company, which is one of the major independent healthcare technology providers in the U.S., the utilization of blockchain technology will help their clients in boosting revenue cycle efficiency, improving real-time analytics, cutting down costs and creating “innovative new services.” Using the organization’s Intelligent Healthcare Network, Change Healthcare processes 12 billion transactions covering over $2 trillion in claims annually.
Change Healthcare CEO Neil de Crescenzo stated that the company is working together with both customers and organizations, such as the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Project, to make access to blockchain technology — and the benefits of the tech — and to develop “additional, advanced use cases.”
“We are excited to work alongside our customers and partners to make blockchain real in healthcare. As today’s healthcare system becomes more value-based, it’s essential that we aggressively and pervasively introduce new technologies into healthcare at scale — whether they leverage blockchain, artificial intelligence or other emerging capabilities with the potential to improve outcomes and efficiencies. We are initially introducing blockchain technology to create a distributed ledger that makes claims processing and secure payment transactions work more efficiently and cost effectively for all healthcare stakeholders,” Mr. de Crescenzo said.
“We want to make it easier and more efficient for health care as an industry to utilize this technology and make it a better experience for the consumers as well as the clinicians who don’t want to spend their time on the computer,” Aaron Symanski, CTO of Change Healthcare, told Bitcoin Magazine. “They just want to go out there and help more people every day.”
According to the company’s plans, blockchain technology will be implemented on the Intelligent Healthcare Network by the end of the year. Change Healthcare highlighted that their vendor partners and customers will not have to develop new code, interfaces or data formats.
Change Healthcare will utilize the Linux Foundation’s open-source Hyperledger Fabric 1.0 blockchain framework. Change Healthcare is a premier member of the Hyperledger Governing Board; therefore, the company will be contributing code innovations to the open-source community in order to improve blockchain applications in the United States and on a global scale.
“Change Healthcare is uniquely positioned to lead blockchain innovation for healthcare, and we are excited to participate in this transformative undertaking with them. With its security, transparency of transactions, and ability for all stakeholders to access the same information, blockchain technology has potential to increase payment accuracy and revenue velocity, which will benefit payers, providers, and consumers themselves,” Brian Behlendorf, executive director of Hyperledger, said in a statement.
According to Change Healthcare, today’s blockchain announcement is a part of a series of strategic actions taken by the company. In May, Change Healthcare joined Hyperledger’s premier membership as the first healthcare IT vendor. By implementing blockchain technology to the company’s services, Change Healthcare seeks to hold its position as a leading innovator along with accelerating the adoption and the development of blockchain and other innovative technologies.