Executives from Nashville-based Change Healthcare have announced that its Intelligent Healthcare Network with blockchain is now available featuring claims management transparency, attesting that it is the first enterprise-scale blockchain in healthcare.
Leveraging blockchain technology, organizations can accurately track, in real time, the status of claims submission and remittance across the complete claim lifecycle. “The single source of truth created by a blockchain will spark innovative new services for a more streamlined, patient-centric health system,” Change Healthcare officials noted in a press release.
Last fall, Change Healthcare CEO, Neil de Crescenzo, made an announcement during his keynote address at the Distributed: Health 2017 conference that it would be developing the Intelligent Healthcare Network with blockchain. He said at the time that the company is collaborating with customers and organizations such as The Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger project to make the benefits of blockchain technology broadly available and develop additional, advanced use cases.
According to officials, the Intelligent Healthcare Network is used to process clinical, administrative, and financial transactions among hundreds of thousands of healthcare industry stakeholders (physicians, hospitals, and other providers as well as commercial and government payers), including processing over $2 trillion in claims annually.
The Intelligent Healthcare Network is currently processing more than 50 million claims events daily and up to 550 transactions per second through its blockchain. “This capacity and speed significantly exceeds the daily national transaction load and throughput requirements of the network and provides headroom for additional scale as blockchain technology adoption grows. A significant increase in this performance baseline is expected as the solution is further optimized and scaled to address demand,” Change Healthcare officials noted.
de Crescenzo added in the most recent announcement, "We are excited to work with customers and partners on applying blockchain technology to improve how payers and providers interact and conduct business, starting with the revenue cycle and payment process. While others are experimenting with use cases, the pervasiveness of our Intelligent Healthcare Network has enabled us to quickly deploy blockchain at scale in addressing a highly administrative process, providing a launching pad for broad adoption.”
Change Healthcare is already a premier member of the Hyperledger governing board, and will be contributing code innovations back to the open source community to improve blockchain applications for the U.S. and global healthcare industry. Further, the company recently announced that it has joined the Hashed Health consortium, a firm dedicated to realizing the potential of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies.
Last March, Change Healthcare and San Francisco-based McKesson announced the closing of their transaction to form a new healthcare technology company.
