Update: January 2018
On Jan. 8, Nashville-based Change Healthcare announced that its Intelligent Healthcare Network™ with blockchain is now available featuring claims management transparency, making it 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. In addition to improving transparency and efficiency, the incorporation of blockchain technology in the Intelligent Healthcare Network enables greater auditability, traceability, and trust--all for better revenue cycle management. The single source of truth created by a blockchain will spark innovative new services for a more streamlined, patient-centric health system.
"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," said Neil de Crescenzo, president and CEO of Change Healthcare. "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. We will continue to leverage blockchain and other technologies to develop additional applications that can make healthcare more patient-centric while addressing cost and quality."
As one of the largest independent healthcare IT companies in the United States, Change Healthcare services customers across the continuum of care. 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.
Working with customers and partners from throughout the industry, Change Healthcare is introducing value-added services and advanced analytics daily. 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.
"With this solution, we've demonstrated that blockchain technology can be effective for high-data volume, high-throughput transaction processing in healthcare," said Aaron Symanski, chief technology officer, Change Healthcare. "This expands our opportunities for innovative new products and solutions that leverage blockchain--several of which we have already started to explore."
One area of exploration is using blockchain technology to provide a single source of truth for accurately tracking and providing visibility to the complete patient healthcare encounter, starting from when an individual might arrive for a preoperative visit, all the way through the procedure and care received, to billing and then payment. "Not only could blockchain technology enable accurate tracking because of its immutability, the ability to make that visible to everyone involved in the encounter opens the door to create a more patient-centric experience and streamline processes, which benefits everyone," noted Symanski.
Change Healthcare used Hyperledger Fabric™ 1.0, an open source blockchain framework and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by The Linux Foundation, as the foundation for its blockchain application design and development. As a Premier member of the Hyperledger Governing Board, Change Healthcare is contributing code innovations back to the open source community to improve blockchain applications for global healthcare and other industries.
Related Graphics Depicting Blockchain in Action:
Change Healthcare Intelligent Healthcare NetworkTM w/Blockchain
Claims Management Transparency
Applying Blockchain to the Revenue Cycle & Payment Process
Previously Reported in Fall 2017
On Sept. 25, Change Healthcare announced the launch of the first blockchain solution for enterprise-scale use in healthcare, enabling payers and providers to boost revenue cycle efficiency, improve real-time analytics, cut costs, and create innovative new services. As one of the largest independent healthcare IT companies in the United States, Change Healthcare services customers across the continuum of care, using its Intelligent Healthcare Network™ to process 12 billion healthcare-related transactions covering over $2.0 trillion in claims annually.
Change Healthcare CEO Neil de Crescenzo made the announcement during his keynote address at the Distributed: Health 2017 conference in Nashville. He said the Intelligent Healthcare Network™ will support blockchain transactions by the end of the year. Change Healthcare will employ Hyperledger Fabric 1.0, an open source blockchain framework and one of the Hyperledger projects hosted by The Linux Foundation, as its foundation for blockchain application design and development. Change Healthcare is 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.
"We are excited to work alongside our customers and partners to make blockchain real in healthcare," said de Crescenzo. "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."