“In health care, these inefficiencies are in clinical areas and in administrative areas – or just friction that happens in the system which leads to bad customer experience,” says IBM's Barbara Hayes. (Photo: Shutterstock)
Titans of tech, finance and health care are teaming up to develop a blockchain network that they believe will make the health care payment system more efficient.
The collaboration involves IBM, Aetna, Anthem, Health Care Services Corporation and PNC Bank. IBM described the effort as a paradigm-shifting attempt by competitors to work together to reduce costs.
“It's so important because you do have competitors side by side who are going after tremendous amounts of waste that is in the health care system; 40 cents, 50 cents on the dollar,” says IBM's Barbara Hayes, who oversees the company's relationships with insurers, in an interview with CoinDesk.
Another IBM leader tells Fierce Healthcare that IBM's blockchain platform is available for members of the initiative to experiment on. Says Bill LaFontaine, general manager of IBM's intellectual property division:
“We're going to start enabling our members, probably by Monday, to be able to go and take a solution they have already built and start to port it to the platform, then they can decide who they want to experiment with. One of the beauties of blockchain is, not only is it a platform for innovation, it's also a platform for collaboration,” LaFontaine said. “This is a platform where our members can begin to test out what they are doing, and I think that's going to accelerate innovation.”
The members of the initiative hope that new platform's predictive analytics will enable the companies to spot inefficiencies in the payment system, from improperly coded claims to unnecessary or duplicative services.
“In health care, these inefficiencies are in clinical areas and in administrative areas – or just friction that happens in the system which leads to bad customer experience,” says Hayes.
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