The finance and healthcare sectors greatly benefit from the initiatives integrated with blockchain. Being a secure platform to transfer money and sensitive data, many institutions have sought the help of impact technologies to streamline their processes. To be more specific, blockchain, being a form of distributed ledger technology, helps in lowering costs, integrate faster transactions, improve transparency, save time, and much more. For a majority of users and key players in the finance and healthcare industries, using blockchain will disrupt how they do the traditional processes in payment, information sharing, and much more.
Integrating blockchain in insurance will revolutionize how companies provide services to their clients. Fraud is among the problems that cause huge threats to the industry. With blockchain, every transaction is assured safe and traceable. In today’s era, a lot of insurance companies are investing in impact technologies, focusing their efforts in creating solutions that result in savings and efficiency. And of those companies is insurance giant Anthem.
Anthem, an insurance plan provider, uses blockchain to allow encryption of medical data. The company focuses on the privacy of healthcare information as well as providing an easy way for patients to access and share personal health data. Anthem’s senior vice president and chief digital officer already said it: what’s important in the sector is to “create a system of trust between parties.” If there’s no trust, no one will want to share their data.
So how will trust be established? Identity Management.
Right now, different parts of the world are struggling to streamline their healthcare process. There is no effective way to access, share, and distribute data privately and safely, which basically targets a huge pain point for patients. Another paint point for patients is there’s no one platform to access all of the medical records. Patients will need to go to different places to get results, such as labs for tests or doctor’s offices for official treatment notes.
In answer to this, Anthem is testing identity management services with the use of blockchain. The said initiative will allow patients to share their health records with their phones. All they need to do is open an app and scan the QR code to permit different healthcare providers to access their medical records. However, this is only available for a limited time and only accessible to around 200 company employees. Anthem has approximately 40 million members. The insurance company said the members would have access in about two to three years.
Despite the limited access to Anthem’s pilot program, the initiative still provides a promising solution to an ongoing struggle of patients, as well as for doctors, distributors, and other parties involved, to have secured access to data and privacy. For patients, Anthem’s initiative gives them control over their information and healthcare records. They have the choice to share it with people they want or not share it at all.
The bottom line is that patient consent is valuable. And with identity management in the healthcare sector, specialists are automatically granted permission to access patient data as long as patients want to. Everything is streamlined, making the experience of sharing records easy and holistic. It also saves on cost as intermediaries are removed in the picture and that patients can track where their information went.
