Nashville-based Change Healthcare, one of the largest independent healthcare IT companies in the U.S., has announced that it has joined the Hashed Health consortium, a firm dedicated to realizing the potential of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies.
The Hashed Health consortium is an innovation hub for collaborative networks in healthcare using distributed ledger technologies, its officials say. It includes a group of healthcare companies with the goal of using blockchain to improve innovation in the sector.
The collaboration between Change Healthcare and Hashed Health “validates blockchain’s momentum in healthcare and sends a strong signal to the market that real work is being done to improve workflows, reduce costs, and improve patient care,” according to officials.
In March, Nashville-based Change Healthcare and San Francisco-based McKesson announced the closing of their transaction to form a new healthcare technology company. Since then, the vendor also became the first healthcare organization to join another blockchain initiative called Hyperledger—an open source collaborative effort created to advance blockchain technology—at the top membership level of the initiative.
Blockchain, which is emerging more and more as a possible solution that could solve some of healthcare’s core problems such as interoperability and data security, was named a Top Tech Trend by Healthcare Informatics earlier this year.
“We are thrilled to announce Change Healthcare as the newest partner in our growing network,” John Bass, CEO of Hashed Health, said in a statement. “With a network reaching nearly every payer and provider in the United States, Change Healthcare advances our efforts to create meaningful innovation. By joining the Hashed Health consortium, Change Healthcare is demonstrating that it understands the potential of blockchain technologies to improve care delivery and now is the time to build the networks responsible for the realization of approaching solutions.”
